London Tech Week is in full swing and Tim Creswick, CEO and Founder of Vorboss, took to the Transformation Stage to discuss connectivity in the heart of London. The Vorboss mission is to take down the telecoms monopoly to empower London’s growth.
Vorboss is a dedicated fibre network for London businesses, providing 10Gbps as a minimum. The company was founded by Tim as a software business 17 years ago, since then he’s gone on to build the second-largest fibre network in London.
Tim saw the opportunity to tackle the decades-long BT monopoly head-on, helped by regulatory changes that enabled faster, low-cost networks to be built.
He went on to secure £250 million to invest in reinventing the business internet experience, and that’s exactly what he did.
Tim told us, “We’re in the dying days of BT’s former monopoly. London businesses are reliant on fibre operated by OpenReach, which is less than a gigabit capacity; it’s unbelievable. In most cases, those networks were built a decade ago, in another time, when needs were different.
“Now our dependency on connectivity has changed massively. We want to do more, but networks haven’t kept pace with that.
“We should have total abundance, ubiquitous connectivity everywhere. In the same way you’re not sitting there thinking, ‘Does this building have enough electricity coming into it?’, you should know there is abundant internet capacity. Fibre is arguably the first or second most important utility.
“What else is vital is diversity—having two connections coming into a building. You have fibre going east and fibre going west. If something happens in the street – like a cable gets dug up – you’ve still got another connection. Work is not disrupted.
“Fibre diversity is becoming like wearing a seatbelt. We automatically wear one because it’s the law, but in the 60’s, it wasn’t commonplace. Now, most of our customers want diversity as standard; that’s how important uninterrupted connectivity is. But London’s networks aren’t designed that way, and a lot of legacy providers struggle to deliver it.
“We offer 10Gbps as standard. People rarely expect this level of uninterrupted connectivity. We’ve all had Zoom calls where we’ve lost video or the audio. It’s an inconvenience, but if that happens during a business meeting where there is a million-pound deal on the table, it becomes a bigger problem.
“The problem we’re fighting is a technical debt we’re paying from the last 30 years of a monopoly. We’re changing this, demanding better and proving the offer can be better. That’s what we’re passing on to our customers.”
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