This week, I was delighted to join fellow Bishopsgate Councillor, Shravan Joshi, in a visit to the new offices of Vorboss, who have recently relocated to 10 Exchange Square on the Broadgate Estate.
Vorboss is London’s only dedicated business fibre network and they are providing businesses in the City with 10Gbps internet at a minimum, with capacity to ramp service provision up to 100Gbps.
Ensuring our capital city has the infrastructure to support innovation and growth in a world of big data and high functioning tech to support the AI revolution is incredibly important, if London is to remains the destination of choice for international investors.
What I find particularly interesting about the Vorboss business model is that every part of their product design, installation and support is managed in-house in London. That means, should there ever be an issue, they can be with their clients very quickly to resolve them. In fact, they have some pretty impressive compensatory clawbacks around outages, because they are so confident in their product performance.
As well as visiting their offices, we got to meet some of their apprentices, all from London. There is a cultural ambition to ensure their workforce represents the diverse community within which they operate. They have set some targets to support more women into the industry. Within their network build team, one in three employees are female engineers – the highest in the sector – and they have pledged to increase this to one in two by 2027. This is facilitated by a number of leading policies to attract and retain diverse staff, particularly those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. They also give every employee a training budget of 5% of their salary each year to do their part in upskilling and supporting talent.
Vorboss has their own training academy at a warehouse near Mile End. It was here that their team created a new Light Maintenance Vehicle (LMV), which recently won the City of London Corporation’s sustainability award. As you will see from the photographs below, this is a sort of cargo e-bike which is powered by pedals, supported by a replaceable battery, and allows Vorboss’s engineer team to navigate the streets of London with ease in an environmentally friendly way. It is essentially a mobile workstation and has all of the kit required to manage installations and repairs as necessary. You can learn more about the LMV here: The Vorboss Light Maintenance Vehicle (LMV)
We finished up with a discussion with Vorboss’s CEO and management team about how the City of London Corporation can support the growth of this impressive scale-up company. A really interesting visit and just one of the huge number of market-leading companies disrupting and innovating industry norms from the wonderful ward of Bishopsgate.
We wish them every success for the future.
