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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My experience was from 2021-2023, forgot to mention that part
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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)
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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.
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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 😅
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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
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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.
I am fortunate that our current leased line provider doesn't auto-renew for a term, it's just a 90-day notice period with ETFs to pay if you serve that notice during the initial term.
I never thought I'd still be with them but CityFibre seem to need 18 months and counting after laying fibre to make it available to more than TalkTalk and Zen, neither of whom can serve customers designated as businesses.
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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.
That is an interesting way of doing it. To avoid you contending with yourself they are going to have to get fibre to you from two different CBTs or resplice fibre so that your drops come from different PON ports.
Might be worth clarifying this. XGSPON will give you about 8.5 Gbit/s on a single PON port so a bit of extra work needs doing, can't just drop two cables from the nearest CBT.
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I'll start by saying I work at Vorboss, so wanted to reply! It's cool to see our services being discussed in this level of detail.
Firstly thanks for the positive words - we've worked incredibly hard to do things differently (and in a business-friendly way) and it seems like some of that resonates with you. We don't believe in locking people into long term contracts, so that's why you have an initial 12-month term and then we move to monthly rolling. We hope that the service quality speaks for itself, and the reality is that you can take your time to constantly re-evaluate whether we're really the best provider for you -- as it should be!
Worth noting that our network isn't PON (XGS or otherwise) - as you probably know, it's point-to-point architecture directly back to a datacentre and then into our core network. We do this at 10Gbps, 25Gbps and 100Gbps as standard, and it's all Ethernet. It was built by technical people, in the way that we would have wanted it if we were you. Of course this is all a bit more costly to do, but there are lots of other benefits (easier to upgrade, no street cabinets, better reliability etc).
I think the other main differences are probably a bit more subtle - Vorboss is set up only to deal with business customers, not residential users. You see this in places like the out-of-hours support, response times, SLAs and compliance (in particular, information security compliance).
If it's helpful, the key differences are described in KB24103002.
The only other thing I would note, is that we're probably not building out to you from as far away as you think. We have a huge amount of fibre in the ground (more than 600km) - and not just a lot of cable, but cables with high fibre counts (and thus, a lot of capacity). Depending on when we connected you, and where you are in London, it may have been 100m or so away from our nearest node, but usually we are a lot closer than that - you will see thousands of our access chambers in the pavements when you walk around. This proximity is a key design feature of the network, which is why we can connect customers with no ECCs, in predictable (fast) install times at a fixed cost.
So thank you for your business, and we would love to retain you as a customer. Please do come and speak to us if we're not meeting expectations - anyone is welcome to drop into our Liverpool Street office for a visit and to meet the team. Alternatively feel free to drop me a message via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tcreswick/
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That was a top notch post. Even though I'm not the target thanks for taking the time, Tim.
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Interesting that your KB says you have UK and European coverage, but your website implies London zones 1 and 2 only - is this marketing not keeping up with the network, are you soft-launching services using other wholesale networks, or is it more a case of wanting something in place so if an existing London client wants to service a subsidiary location in e.g. Bristol you are able to offer something even if it's not your main focus?
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Good point. We service all of the UK and many European cities (we have > 30 datacentre points of presence). We also use this presence in EU locations to improve our peering arrangements with other networks - one of the reasons we're one of the best peered networks in Europe (you can explore that here https://bgp.he.net/AS25160).
If you're on our network, you'll definitely see the impact of that as overall QoS is very good, and latency is generally amongst the best because of the focus on quality peering, backhaul and transit.
In London, we service customers using our own fibre end-to-end (no 3rd parties anywhere) so that's the focus you see on our website. For rest of the UK we still use Openreach fibre (amongst a few others) for the 'last mile', the same as everyone else does. That's something we've been doing for well over 10 years at this point.
Across Europe, we have similar arrangements with last mile fibre providers in each metro, so the model is that we can connect a customer's office building in Berlin back to our local POP (NTT Berlin 1) and then into our IP network. We have a lot of customers who have multiple office locations across Europe, for whom we solve their full estate connectivity problems.
The general rule is that we buy last mile fibre directly from the fibre asset owners, not intermediaries or wholesalers. The theme is that quality is more important than cost for most of our customers (although clearly we still work incredibly hard to make sure we're also the most price competitive!).
A full list of our European points of presence is available in KB24091819.
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Many thanks for taking the time to post Tim. As noted, we've been very happy with the service from Vorboss this last year.
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That's awesome, and why we're here!
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I get that but the first set of prices look to fit better with your description, the second set looks like they are basically telling the customer we dont want you signing up for only 12 months. It stands out so much as its along side the 24/36 months dropping in price. If it was as you said the 24 month would be much more expensive than it is scaled proportionally.
This as a red flag I think, as the new pricing suggests they have struggled to retain 12 month contract customers.
Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 01-Nov-24 16:53:34)
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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.
That is an interesting way of doing it. To avoid you contending with yourself they are going to have to get fibre to you from two different CBTs or resplice fibre so that your drops come from different PON ports.
Might be worth clarifying this. XGSPON will give you about 8.5 Gbit/s on a single PON port so a bit of extra work needs doing, can't just drop two cables from the nearest CBT.
I think their sales folks could do with some additional training. When I called to discuss they appeared to be under the impression that they would simply install 2 drops and 2 ONTs. There wasn't immediate clarity as to whether they would actually take each 5 Gbps service from a separate PON to avoid immediate contention - as you have rightly noted. It was quite hazy and not at all confidence inspiring.
To be honest I've gone cold on the idea of using them, even for backup service provision. I dunno somehow it all feels very amateur hour. Maybe I'm being harsh.
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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.
Now finished reviewing the various provider quotes / proposals received over the last week. It's certainly an interesting market at the moment and has changed since the last time going out market 12- 24 months ago.
The wash up is that we've entered a new agreement with Vorboss which price wise is commercially excellent. It maintains all the standard customer friendly aspects of their agreements, like invoicing monthly in arrears, no up front costs and no CPI/RPI++ annual price ratcheting through the term. It's seamless too, as an existing service there's nothing to change. Most importantly they're a known (high quality) provider.
As for Community Fibre: decided not up for it as a primary provider, but perhaps (mindful of your health warning) still using them for a resilient/backup connection. Not at the highest bandwidth tiers; so have asked them if they can make their numbers stack on lower tier, as they'd still have to cost to build to us, but not an exceptional distance really.
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Interesting news from Vorboss and Neos today…
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/11/neos-n...
(Perhaps I should’ve posted in the Neos thread I started last week….😂)
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For me part of the value in selecting a price-competitive altnet would be to benefit from the vertical integration in hopefully reducing fix times, not having the team who can see the light levels and the team who can see the packet loss working for separate companies. I'm sure it's a boost if you're an enterprise customer with Neos as your preferred provider though.
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