Network operator Vorboss offers 100 gigabit connectivity – but only in central London Network operator Vorboss is offering London businesses a 100Gbit/sec service with a fixed monthly price set for the length of the contract, claiming it removes bandwidth constraints for the city's most data-hungry firms. Vorboss unveiled its network covering central London in September, claiming it had installed over 500km of …
"We believe focusing on the City is right because no one else sells full coverage fiber directly to businesses in central London at a minimum of 10Gbit/sec,"
So the Vorboss site is.. rather light on details about how the service is actually provisioned. It makes some interesting claims like being an ISP offering 'full 10Gbps'. I'm guessing the SLA doesn't guarantee that, and it'd be fun to provision. From a quick poke, Vorboss is part of Fern Trading, who bought them and Giganet recently. But Nx10Gbps would need a decent chunk of transit, peering and some BFRs to deliver.
There's also plenty of competition from other suppliers, it being the City and all. Many of which have been digging up streets and overbuilding for a lot longer, so may have more buildings 'lit', or at least proximate. Most of them also offer 10-100Gbps services, so the USP seems to be the fixed price and no install. That's mostly a commercial thing, but the costs of 'last mile' connectivity around the City can get very high. As can the actual provisioning, ie how many optical nodes a 100Gbps have to transit. Maybe they're going to try for a mostly passive solution, but that'll have a big impact on SLA.
I feel sorry for every IT manager this morning fending off management claiming they can save £100k a year by going with Vorboss under the impression "all connectivity is equal". What do you mean we pay X for 1GBPS, and then X for RO2, and X for enhanced SLA?!
Telecoms is a generally dull marketplace with a captive audience (usually tied into 3-5 year contracts - "Yes, of course I'll give you a call back in 2026 Mr IT manager..!") and this is an interesting good news story for Vorboss all while giving Openreach a hard time as it is "woke" to do so. Truth is there are plenty of alternative carriers in most cities, see CityFibre, Cogent, Virgin Media (on-net), the list goes on..
£3000 for 100Gb is £30/Gb - on the cheap side but comparable to generic openreach FTTP connectivity.
So a building like 22 Bishopsgate (as per the article) could have 1 connection covering all 62 floors. Or they could probably get 62 separate connections, one per floor, for around the same price but with a bit more resilience.
It's an interesting product, but will remain very niche for now.
You are going to need a 100gb capable router and then a 100gb capable firewall.
Puts the cost up quite a bit (probably a few hundred grand for the kit)
It is all very well having that capability but using it is another matter and as other comment have said what is the sla, if I was putting that sort of link in I would want two of them (in case of failures) and they would need to be diverse routed for resilience
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