Resilient, Multi-homed Supply

Bandwidth provision to the Internet is a key component of hosting. Supplies of bandwidth do fail on occasions and result in interruptions or degraded performance for your business critical systems.

This is why EQSN has invested heavily in equipment and multiple supply sources of bandwidth to provide a "failsafe" bandwidth environment. We monitor and review the quality of supply of bandwidth from all our sources, ensure that each supply is mutually independent and select several reliable suppliers.

These multiple bandwidth supplies are fed into our network in a triangulated, resilient form where our infrastructure ensures that, in the event of failure of one or more of the supplies, there remains a continuous supply of bandwidth to all our customers.

More than just providing telecoms from a number of different suppliers, thereby providing a route for connectivity resilience, our Glasgow and Edinburgh data-centres are connected to the Wolrd-IX Internet exchange.

This means, for instance that traffic destined for other parts of Scotland does not have to go to London and back again. In the event of failure of one telco the systems will automatically switch through to another telco, thereby ensuring the maximum potential Internet connectivity. This is a key factor that often plagues other ISP and hosting organisations.

BGP-4 & Triangulated Schematic

This BGP-4 compliant, triangulated infrastructure ensures that your servers will remain connected to the Internet.

Supplying the right amount of Bandwidth

Bandwidth needs frequently change. Special projects, steady increase in usage, new product or service launches all generate changes in demand for bandwidth. It is critical that you have the right amount of bandwidth available when you need it.

This is why EQSN has made arrangements with Telcos to have open-ended provision - allowing us to draw Gigabytes of bandwidth on demand. On demand ensures that when we charge for bandwidth you only pay for what you use and that you can take more than you are contracted to. Often bandwidth requirements result in surges that may be difficult to predict, our model permits this type of activity and is geared to ensure you have the capacity when you need it.

Burstable usage

In general terms customers contract to a baseline bandwidth that should be sufficient to meet their average monthly usage. For our calculations usage is monitored over a monthly period. Where circumstances result in increased usage we calculate the usage over the month and determine what the additional charge is and if there has been sufficient traffic to warrant moving into another baseline band.

Bandwidth

There are 2 main measures for Bandwidth - Bandwidth and Transfer Volume.
The table below provides indicative comparisons of bandwidth and the approximate equivalent monthly transfer volume.

EQSN measures bandwidth in terms of the first column - Bandwidth

Bandwidth Gb/Month