Infrastructure
What we operate
Four things, in the order we added them: buildings, fibre, routing, and the silicon that does the routing. Everything else the industry sells sits on top of one of the four, and we have consistently declined to sell it.
01 — Colocation
Halls we own, in buildings we own
We are the landlord, the electrician and the network. That is unusual and it is the whole argument: when a chiller fails at Grayling there is no third party to attend, and when a hall runs hot the person who signed for the mechanical design still works here.
Halls are sold by power, not by floor area, because power is the constraint and has been since 1997. We will tell you the installed headroom of a specific hall under NDA; we will not publish it, because published headroom is bid against.
Carrier-neutral without qualification. There are 31 networks on-net at the Ostrow Line meet-me and we compete with most of them.
| Rack density, standard | 4 – 12 kW, A+B feeds, shared containment |
|---|---|
| Rack density, high | 12 – 28 kW, rear-door heat exchanger |
| Rack density, engineered | to 42 kW, direct liquid, per-hall agreement |
| Cabinet | 600 × 1200 × 47U, or customer-supplied to our anchor pattern |
| Electrical | Two independent utility feeds, 2N UPS, N+1 generation, 96 h fuel on site |
| Mechanical | N+1 minimum; 2N in halls sold as 2N. Free cooling where the region allows it |
| Cold aisle | 8 – 24 °C, contained, ASHRAE-equivalent envelope |
| Availability | 99.999% at the busway, measured at the busway |
| Access | Two-factor at the perimeter, mantrap at the hall, escorted first visit |
| Remote hands | 15 min acknowledged, 60 min actioned, 24 h |
02 — IP transit
AS64502, full tables, no default
Transit is sold on commit, in credits, per megabit per month, on a term. There is no burst penalty structure and no 95th-percentile arithmetic designed to be misunderstood: you commit, you are billed on the commit, and overage is at the same unit rate as the commit.
The backbone is engineered to carry its busiest hour with any single span failed. We publish the utilisation curve quarterly, including the two spans that are currently above where we would like them.
- BGP communities documented publicly
- Blackhole community honoured at every edge
- RPKI-validating, invalids dropped
- IRR-filtered on customer sessions
- Flowspec available on 100G+ commits
- IPv6 at no additional charge, ever
| Commit | Port | Rate | Term |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commit 1 Gbit/s | 10 GE | 0.9 credits / Mbit/s / month | 12 months |
| Commit 10 Gbit/s | 10 GE / 100 GE | 0.62 credits / Mbit/s / month | 12 months |
| Commit 100 Gbit/s | 100 GE LR4 | 0.31 credits / Mbit/s / month | 24 months |
| Commit 400 Gbit/s | 400 GE FR4 | 0.18 credits / Mbit/s / month | 36 months |
| Above 1 Tbit/s | 400/800 GE | On application | Negotiated |
Indicative only. Rates are in credits and are confirmed on a quotation against a specific port at a specific facility.
03 — Fibre and interconnect
Glass, and the right to dig
The backbone is ours: conduit, fibre, huts, and in eleven cases the field the conduit crosses. Buying the route rather than the capacity was an expensive decision taken in the early nineties by people who wanted the network to still be here now.
Interconnect inside our halls is a cross-connect, priced per connect per month, with no recurring charge for the first one in any new cage. Interconnect at an exchange is settlement-free under our open policy.
| Backbone | 41,880 route-km, owned, not leased |
|---|---|
| Long-haul line rate | 400G and 800G coherent, 1.2T in trial on two spans |
| Metro | Dark fibre pairs, CWDM/DWDM, or managed wavelengths |
| Subsea | Five systems; two owned outright, three on 25-year IRU |
| Diversity | No two contracted paths share a duct. Where they do, it is disclosed and dated |
| Restoration | Sub-50 ms on protected wavelengths; unprotected is unprotected |
04 — Routing silicon
Seven generations, one customer
In 1988 the merchant parts available to us could not hold the table we needed, so we designed one that could. We have not missed a tape-out in nineteen years. The parts are not sold, licensed or sampled; they go into our line cards, our line cards go into our halls, and the effect reaches customers as latency and price rather than as a product.
The counter plane on SL-7 is larger than the forwarding requirement because Platform Defence specifies it that way. Defence observability is a design input at the same tier as line rate, which is unusual, and is the reason ICE runs in the fabric rather than beside it.
| Family | First silicon | Function | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| SL-1 | 1988 | Forwarding engine | Retired 1996 |
| SL-2 | 1993 | Forwarding engine, first in-house lookup | Retired 2001 |
| SL-3 | 1998 | Line card ASIC | Retired 2009 |
| SL-4 | 2004 | Line card ASIC, first algorithmic lookup | Retired 2018 |
| SL-5 | 2010 | Forwarding plane, integrated scheduler | Operating, MRH1 and OST1 |
| SL-6 | 2017 | Forwarding plane, 400G native | Operating, all regions |
| SL-7 | 2023 | Forwarding plane, 800G native, expanded counter plane | Operating, ramping |
| SL-8 | 2028 (planned) | In RTL | Tape-out slot contracted |
Platform defence
ICE, as a property of the fabric
At the edge
Ruleset applied at every peering and transit edge, promoted weekly. Barrier is coarse, fast and public: customers can see what it dropped on their prefixes.
At the customer boundary
Per-customer thresholds on the cage-facing port. Tuned by us, on our schedule, under the terms of the colocation agreement.
Inside the hall
Operates within the hall boundary and is permitted to act there without an operator in the loop. Actions are reviewed within two hours and recorded in full.
Trace Operations maintains attribution on hostile activity across all fabrics and hands findings to Incident Command and to Regulatory & Lawful Access. Customers are not parties to that process and do not receive trace product.