We’re concerned at the level of traffic customers are delivering to us over the public Internet and would like to encourage you to connect directly to us in one or more sites.
We work hard to make our network as performant as possible and deliver the best quality of service, regardless of how your traffic gets to us. In fact, over 86% of traffic coming to us over “public” Internet actually comes to us fairly directly, usually due to us peering with your ISP on an IXP or privately. This is a really high ratio in the industry and accounts for the performance we deliver to you.
However, we pointed out some months ago that in the event of a major DDoS event on our network or elsewhere you may be unable to reach us. Whilst we have so far shunned such attacks against Simwood without disruption, we’re simply unable to guarantee we can always do so, even though our multi-site architecture puts us far ahead of most.
Furthermore, over the last month a few customers have experienced debilitating attacks themselves and connecting directly to us has become an urgent consideration, in order to protect their voice traffic. We want to encourage you in the strongest of terms to consider doing this now rather than later.
To encourage you to do this, for the month of July 2016, we will waive our usual £500 set-up fee per switch port, you just need to pay any data centre cabling charges to reach us in a mutually workable site. For production accounts (i.e. Start-up, Virtual Interconnect or Managed Interconnect) we will offer a suitably sized port at no monthly charge! This is a net cost to us but is a cost worth incurring.
If you have the capability, we’ll operate BGP with you on this port so you retain the ability to route to us through other paths. If not, we’ll allocate a small block of Simwood address space that you can directly attach to your equipment. In either scenario you’ll want to face us in more than one site, and redundantly on your own network – 2 sites from 2 sites is most common amongst our largest directly connected customers.
We’re investing quite heavily in our own network survivability and I think it is fair to say we’re already ahead of competitors, but please do consider taking us up on this offer. It isn’t a sales pitch; we want your traffic to continue uninterrupted in the event of an incident that affects our or your ISP’s edge capacity. Please don’t defer thinking about it until it is too late.
