Here East gets 400Gbps Vorboss fibre node at Olympic Park campus

Here East, the innovation campus built within the former Olympic Press and Broadcast Centre at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London, has struck a connectivity partnership with Vorboss that will see the fibre operator install a core network node directly on site. The arrangement delivers dedicated 400Gbps capacity, rather than routing traffic back to a remote data centre or telephone exchange in the conventional manner.

The on-campus node model is technically distinct from a standard leased-line arrangement. Because internet connectivity originates from within the campus perimeter, tenants gain lower latency and avoid contention points introduced by backhaul. Here East says the upgrade is designed to support organisations running data-intensive workloads, including AI model development, advanced content production and high-throughput research.

The deal

Gavin Poole, chief executive of Here East, said the campus was built to bring together industries shaping the future "in a single, collaborative environment," and that the Vorboss partnership ensures the supporting infrastructure matches that ambition. Rhod Morgan, co-chief executive at Vorboss, described Here East as "exactly the kind of place our network was built for: ambitious, data-hungry organisations that need infrastructure that keeps pace with their growth."

Here East is home to more than 7,000 workers and students daily, drawn from over 30 organisations including Sports Interactive, Ford Mobility, UCL, Loughborough University London and the V&A East Storehouse. The campus spans 1.2 million square feet and is owned by clients of Delancey, a specialist real estate investment advisory firm. Financial terms of the Vorboss agreement were not disclosed.

Market context

London's appetite for high-capacity urban fibre has intensified as AI workloads and large-format media production push bandwidth requirements well beyond what legacy copper or standard Ethernet-over-fibre services can sustain. Vorboss, which positions itself as an end-to-end owner-operator of a dedicated London business fibre network, competes in a market that includes BT Openreach's enterprise products, CityFibre and a number of smaller alternative network providers (altnets) that have raised significant capital in recent years to lay new urban duct.

The broader London tech backdrop cited in the release is notable: the city reportedly attracted $12.6 billion in technology investment during 2026 alone, placing it third globally and first in Europe by that measure, while producing twelve new unicorns in the year. Those figures, sourced from the release rather than an independently cited report, provide context for the demand signal Vorboss and Here East are responding to, though readers should note they are unverified in the release itself.

Regulatory and standards read-across

Urban fibre deployment in the UK sits within Ofcom's ongoing competition oversight of the altnet sector, where concern about overbuild and long-term network viability has prompted the regulator to monitor consolidation. The EU's Gigabit Infrastructure Act, which entered application in 2024, is less directly relevant for a London-only operator post-Brexit, but reflects a shared policy direction: public bodies across Europe are pushing for high-capacity connectivity to innovation districts and campuses as an economic-competitiveness lever.

For Here East's tenant mix, consistent sub-millisecond latency and headroom well above current peak demand will matter more than raw 400Gbps headline figures; most individual tenants will consume a fraction of that aggregate capacity. The value of the on-premises node model is less about peak throughput and more about guaranteed dedicated capacity and the ability to scale incrementally without renegotiating external circuits.