Regular readers will know the lengths we’ve gone to maximise the performance and uptime of our network. We operate nationally, and deploy the lowest latency Arista equipment in most sites. Read about our recent investments in this area if you missed it, as well as the many innovations we’ve deployed. This has all been to maximise the stability and quality of our voice services, but we have also, very quietly, offered connectivity from all sites. We’re now ready operationally to take our foot off that particular brake and offer you, or your customers, fantastic connectivity options.
Ethernet fibre
In speeds from 10Mbps to 10Gbps, nationwide, we can offer ultra-low-latency un-contended connectivity from your end-users back to our core. Whether we then hand it off to you over ethernet, join multiple circuits together for a multi-site solution, or offer you Internet access over our IP Transit is entirely up to you.
We’ll reach your sites by Openreach fibre from one of our PoPs if within reach, work with one of the national ethernet providers, or both. We have great terms with many given our existing voice business so can hopefully give you a very competitive, but naturally high quality, option.
IP Transit (with or without DDoS mitigation)
Many customers have taken our advice and now have a Direct Connect to us in at least one site, often two. There are many great reasons for doing this as well as the obvious improved stability and performance for your voice traffic, regardless of what occurs on the wider Internet.
This, combined with our huge number of peering relationships, many of which are private over dedicated connectivity, mean that broadly 86% of our traffic flows directly between us and the peer network. This is a very high ratio in the industry and means that only 14% of our traffic flows over conventional transit providers. However, these are top drawer options including Telia (now the world’s largest) and GTT and our ports are specified to carry our full network load should it be necessary – thus they’re very quiet and eat significant bursts of traffic for breakfast!
We’d, therefore, love to offer more customers the benefit of our transit to reach your customers and the wider Internet. They may well be on-net already, and of course we probably already peer with other voice providers you may work with. We offer it in a few flavours:
Full Transit
The whole Internet over a dedicated 1-40Gb port in a common PoP, or as an upgrade to your existing Direct Connect.
Partial Transit
Our peers and transit customers over a dedicated 1-40Gb port in a common PoP, or as an upgrade to your existing Direct Connect.
VoIP Fraud Enhancement
We already block the baddest of the fraudsters and scanners from our own network, as identified in real-time by our honeypots. We can optionally do this for transit customers too – a completely unique service in the industry.
For customers taking one or more 10Gb ports, or committed to 1000 or more channels over our Managed Interconnect service, the full list of identified attacking IP addresses is available in real-time through our API*
DDoS enhancement
We’ve invested heavily in our network and one of the reasons for that is in order to protect it, and ensure we can continue to deliver high service levels in all scenarios. All transit customers enjoy RTBH (Remote Triggered Black Hole) – the ability to instruct us to drop traffic to individual IPs (/32) being attacked.
If you prefer not make the attack a success, and instead have traffic scrubbed, we work with a very large DDoS mitigation vendor and you can announce any of your attacked /24s out via them. There is a charge for this, but we can pass on the benefit of us already having this, and on-net measures in place.
We recognise that basic connectivity is very commoditised and ‘me too’ sells it very aggressively. For their voice services, ‘me too’ connectivity is fine.
We strongly believe our customers offer, and aspire to, more than that and put doing a good job and adding genuine value to end users before awards and golf. We’d, therefore, be really interested in quoting for any requirements you have. Please speak to your account manager or, if you’re not already a Simwood customer, get in touch.
*API fraud feeds are provided ‘as is without warranty’ and will not have been sanitised in any way. This is offered at our discretion and not an automatic entitlement with services, given the sensitivity of the data provided.
