Community Fibre (Business) 5 Gbps & 10 Gbps service?

Made some enquiries today with CF Business as our Vorboss service in London has crossed its 12-month anniversary and will soon be on rolling. I’m going to enquire with them on renewal terms this week.

Vorboss has been without shadow of doubt, absolutely excellent by all measures. Probably the best business internet provider I’ve dealt with. But they do come at a price premium.

Therefore looking again at the business offerings from CF and they have substantially reduced in price. For example 18 months ago (April 2023 to be precise) these were the deals:

Term. 12 months / 24 months / 36 months / 60 months
Package
1 Gbps. £360 / £300 / £270 / na
5 Gbps. £395 / £355 / £335 / na
10 Gbps. £850 / £765 / £722 / na

In October 24 they are quoting:
Package
1 Gbps. £421 / £185 / £130 / £105
5 Gbps. £459 / £225 / £160 / £130
10 Gbps. £540 / £486 / £378 / £324

So a *very* substantial reduction on the 24 and 26 months prices from 18 months ago. Also the introduction of a 60 month term option (way too long / risky for my tastes).

What is interesting is that they actually are not selling the 10 Gbps service at the moment and won’t be according to the rep until the early part of 2025. He wasn’t sure exactly why, but was going to check with their technical team.

Interestingly they would lieu sell us 2 x 5 Gbps services - which ends up being cheaper than 1 x 10 Gbps service.

It’s apparently dedicated (1:1 contention ratio) service delivered over their XGS-PON network, so unlike most other Ethernet-based DIA “leased line” services (that are “wires only”) there is not an NTU supplied, just an Adtran SDX 630 series ONT with 10G copper / fibre client interface as needed.

So my question is how good, as a business-class service is it for the price - service wise, stability and outright performance?

My thoughts on the pricing changes is a bit of not impressed, I have never been happy with price gouging shorter contracts, to me it looks like extreme levels of gouging on 1 and 5gbps, as some sort of manipulation of customer behaviour or the longer contracts are not sustainable.

I would be inclined to stay where you are if happy.

I cant answer the question on what they like service wise.

Can I ask what you paying now?

Thanks for your thoughts.

24 and 36-months contracts are pretty commonplace agreement terms with these sorts of circuits. It's party due to the necessity of them covering their (sometimes substantial) build and ECC charges and then where once tails had to be procured from a carrier which also had a knock-on longer term commitment. So the industry has evolved to these 24/36-month agreements, which correspondingly have the most completive prices.. You can have shorter agreements but they are more expensive to cover the ECCs, build and one-off costs in a shorter contractual time window.

Vorboss is quite unusual in this regard, as they not only use their own network end to end - so they are typically building out to you from farther afield than say an operator that can pick up an Openreach or Virgin tails from a nearby node on the street. Vorboss also do not discreetly charge for ECCs in my experience and they unusually have a short minimum term of 12-months. That's certainly appealing from the point of view of not being tied into a long contract - especially when historically (not so much of recent times but..) comms prices dropped over time.

As such the cost of build has to come from somewhere, and since they don't charge for it separately / up front its build into the service charge which is one of the reasons the Vorboss proposition is in relative terms, quite expensive in a 12-month window.

As for CF I'm OK figuring out what works for us pricing wise / contractually - what I'm really asking for here is folks actual experiences with Community Fibre as a business-grade service provider - service reliability and performance, responsiveness, and of course network performance. I have a gut feeling from speaking with them and anecdotally knowing what they're like on the resi-side of the fence, but I want to hear what folks experiences are with CF Business product and service.

Folks feel free to PM me, if you'd rather not discuss on a public forum.

I had a 400 Mbps Community Fibre service as a backup to an EAD in Southwark. I wouldn’t want them as my primary provider.

When the service worked it worked well, but all the stuff that surrounds the technical aspect of the service seems to be lacking - whether it was losing IPv6 as soon as we wanted our IP address to be static (no idea why this was an on-request option for a business service) or the pretty awful coordination where on-site visits were required that delayed fibre fixes by several days, it’s just not ready to be your main service. I spent close to two years trying to get them to phone our front desk if they needed to speak to someone or gain access to their plant, and as soon as they diagnosed a fibre break affecting tenants in the building my personal mobile would ring because I gave them it once when we were having the initial install done and i had the keys.

Thank you @jpm. Just the sort of actual feedback I wanted. Thanks for telling it how it is. Sounds very much like their service wrap isn’t that great. A shame as they looked good (technically and bang for buck) otherwise.

My experience was from 2021-2023, forgot to mention that part

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Made some enquiries today with CF Business as our Vorboss service in London has crossed its 12-month anniversary and will soon be on rolling

If they let you go onto rolling, that in itself is a huge plus for Vorboss.

Almost every business leased line provider I've dealt with does annual auto-renewal in 12-month chunks; and if you don't give notice 90 days before the renewal date then you are committed to renewal, so in effect you're automatically locked in for a 15 month period.

(Cogent is one of the rare exceptions)

In reply to a post by jpm:

My experience was from 2021-2023, forgot to mention that part

Thanks for the clarification / context. That doesn't alter the essence of what you have said. Caveat emptor.

Yes. Vorboss have been really good to be fair. Expensive-ish yes, but really a top tier product and excellent service wrap.

After dealing with numerous other leased line providers in the last few years, in general they start out making the right noises, but ultimately don't cover themselves in glory and leave a lot to be desired. To be fair much like a lot of consumer ISPs, just in different facets.

I'll leave it at that before I get onto a mini-rant about more recent shenanigans I've had with another provider 😅

A friend of mine used to work at Vorboss but recently he's been made redundant and he told me he wasn't the only person it happened to.

Thanks
Dan