Yahoo Finance Meet the man quietly building London’s next bit of vital infrastructure
Internet access is the new crucial bit of infrastructure in any global city. Vorboss offers fast connectivity to London’s fastest growing and most established companies. We meet the man behind the cables, CEO Tim Creswick
“It’s one of those funny things,” Vorboss CEO Tim Creswick tells me as we make small talk about the (for once) warm weather outside.
“You think you’re building a fibre network, and then suddenly you’re approving 50 grand’s worth of sunscreen for your engineers,” he says with a chuckle.
When the weather’s bad? “If we’re doing more delicate work, they’ve got a tent they erect. It looks like a crime scene tent, so we had to brand it. It looked like we’d murdered someone so we had to change it.”
Creswick has a reason for keeping an eye on the weather. He and his army of engineers are quietly building London’s newest infrastructure project, day after day, under our very feet. Vorboss are everywhere and nowhere; their dark green ‘welfare vans’ providing unassuming shelter from sunshine and rain across the capital whilst engineers build a fibre broadband network, specifically for business, that is faster and more reliable than any other major competitor. In a few short years the firm has built a network faster than just about anybody else in the industry can believe.
It wasn’t necessarily the plan from the off, though. Vorboss has been through a few iterations, from data centres to cloud infrastructure. And then he started to look at the infrastructure of connectivity itself: fibre networks.
“There’s a great anecdote of a Midwest fibre-to-home company that used to be a video rental store. They looked at their business go out of the door to Netflix, and they looked at their small town of 7,000 homes, and said well, if Netflix wins, what’s the one thing everyone’s going to need? So they started building a fibre network. That was our thinking too.”
Vorboss was already laying high-performance fibre for specific clients, procuring the kit from other suppliers. The closer they got to the connectivity infrastructure – the actual cables and fibre themselves – they realised they could do it better. And then a 2019 regulatory change opened up a brave new world, with Openreach – the BT-owned digital infrastructure builder, the telecoms equivalent of Network Rail – being forced to open up its ‘ducts’ to other connectivity businesses. To build a cable network you could now use the ‘ducts’ to lay your own kit, rather than having to create your own ducts with all the disruptive, and expensive, building that requires.
Creswick accelerated the firm’s growth but was still thinking about client-led projects. But as other potential competitors bailed out of London as “too hard” or simply because of pandemic uncertainty, Creswick burrowed away with his own (his words) “particular brand of autism” to work out if he could go the other way, and build a fibre connectivity network across the whole of London. His laptop spat out a number. And then he went to find the cash, and the people.
The first was taken care of in a 2020 acquisition by Fern Trading Limited, itself wholly owned by Octopus Investments. The second came with a different challenge; telecoms engineering requires trained staff, with most competitors using contractors. Creswick wanted to go a different route, training a diverse band of Londoners who are in-house, part of the family, which he thinks has created a business packed with people who care about the city they’re working in.
“Our field workforce are hyper-local. We have a map of people’s addresses and it’s really cool, they all live in London. I think that changes (the culture) because there is a real community in London,” he tells me.
“When you hire Londoners, they already have that sense of community. It feels like a small town. If you work in London, and you lay fibre day to day, and you know practically every street, you feel like you’re partly responsible for building the fabric of the city.”
If we’re doing more delicate work, they’ve got a tent they erect. It looks like a crime scene tent, so we had to brand it. It looked like we’d murdered someone.
Vorboss’ band of engineers – male, female, ethnically diverse – go through training in everything from complicated cable splicing to first aid. And, crucially for Creswick, that culture and the ownership of the infrastructure itself means he’s confident that he can provide constant, reliable, high-quality 100gigabit connectivity to businesses that need it. They offer an automatic refund to customers who experience outages or slowdowns (a four-minute shutdown equals a day’s worth of compensation), and since Covid-19, IT managers and those in the C-suite have come round to the idea of buying connectivity capabilities that they don’t necessarily need now, but will do in the future.
That’s translating into greater demand, which in turn makes it more feasible to train an ever larger workforce. And then buy more sunscreen.
Creswick bounds off after our chat – not many questions, very long (and enthusiastic) answers – to his other hobby: motor racing. He drives a Porsche 911 in the Lemans Cup, a set of races across the continent.
“My job is now almost entirely thinking slow. I don’t get to shoot from the hip. To function I need to think fast sometimes. There’s something very visceral about it.”
