UK’s Zen Internet gets a £20 million overdraft to take on the incumbents

Independent UK ISP Zen Internet wants to take on the big operators and has secured £20 million in credit from the NatWest bank to help with that.

The announcement is full of fairly vague, generic pledges to invest the money in growth and that sort of thing. Among those investments will be Zen’s network infrastructure, but no specifics were offered. Zen’s ‘independent network’ currently covers less than a third of the country, so the most obvious area of investment would be to increase that coverage, although even £20 mil won’t get you that far.

“This is a very exciting time for everyone at Zen, including our customers and partners,” said Paul Stobart, CEO of Zen Internet. “As an organisation we will continue to focus on sustainable growth, rather than short term profit, ensuring that we do the right thing by our people, customers and partners.

“A portion of the funding will be used to refinance debt, whilst the balance will be reinvested into our network infrastructure, people and product offerings. We believe that through our exceptionally dedicated people, award-winning services and leadership, we are in a great place to do things differently and achieve our ambitious business targets over the next few years.”

Zen also got a few city types to say how great it is that it can now borrow more cash. Around half of it is apparently earmarked to install Zen gear in 250 exchanges, which will bring its total number of exchanges to 700. Some reports have said that will cover 80% of the country but Zen itself only claims to cover 500,000 of the 1.7 million postcodes. Either way it’s good to see indies giving the big four a run for their money.