London Business ISP Vorboss Does 10Gbps for £150 a Month UPDATE

Network builder and UK broadband ISP Vorboss, which is investing £300m to build their 100Gbps full fibre network – dedicated to business – across central London (they’ve built over 500km of fibre since 2020), has launched a new product called ‘Retail Connect’ – offering speeds up to 10Gbps to the city’s “glass-front” retail outfits from just £150 a month.

Back in 2022 the operator made a commitment to “cover all commercial buildings” in Central London with their new network (here), which they said would aim to deliver data / broadband speeds of 10Gbps as the new minimum standard, with the dizzy heights of 100Gbps also being available for those with much bigger needs.

The 100Gbps enterprise fibre tier that Vorboss typically offers costs from £2,999 +vat per month (very good value for a business line like this), while their 10Gbps tier costs £650 +vat per month (currently discounted to £350). Once again, these are dedicated and Service Level Agreement (SLA) backed business lines, which should not be confused with contended consumer broadband products.

However, the ISP has now launched a new ‘Retail Connect‘ product, which offers speeds of up to 10Gbps and seems to be aimed squarely at retail shops in the city. The service is priced at just £150 per month, which is significantly cheaper than their regular 10Gbps plan and makes us wonder what bit of extra product detail or context we’re missing.

The announcement merely states that the new product offers a direct fibre topology solution (where the customer connection is on a dedicated fibre back to the network core) – much the same as their other tiers – and includes the usual features of 24/7 support, a client-dedicated customer service team, and a vertically integrated network (i.e. the end-to-end service is all done in-house, by the same people who built the network).

Customers using Retail Connect also benefit from the “outstanding Vorboss service level agreements and market-leading automated payout for less than one hour of downtime. This unique form of SLA is possible because the network simply lives up to seamless connectivity in abundance.”

Tim Creswick, Vorboss Founder and CEO, says:

“Retail businesses in London aren’t currently getting the internet reliability they deserve. A connectivity-related card transaction failure in a high-street shop, or a customer unable to connect to a restaurant’s Wi-Fi to place an order, have very real commercial impacts on businesses.

At Vorboss we’re taking enterprise-level experience and equipment to empower an often-underserved segment of the market. Our message to retail customers is that they shouldn’t compromise.

Our firm belief is that you need to be a 10Gbps internet business in the customer space if you want to future-proof what you’re deploying, and we want to offer that solution to a segment of the market that has until now had to put up with repackaged residential connectivity.”

The price point being talked about above is ridiculously cheap for this kind of business connection, hence why we’re currently attempting to clarify how it differs from their regular 10Gbps plan. The news release doesn’t provide a clear answer to that question, but we hope to update again soon.

UPDATE 4:17pm

Vorboss has informed us that their Retail Connect product achieves its lower price point via a number of differences, such as by adopting a physically smaller NTE than their other services – this is passively cooled and doesn’t support dual power feeds; services that enterprise customers would typically require.

The SLA they offer is also a bit softer, although they didn’t clarify in what way. Finally, the targeted sites themselves tend to be easier to connect (e.g. they are usually on the ground floor, so in very close proximity to their existing infrastructure).