This is a high level overview of our network. There is not much in the way of technical detail but it is often useful to know a bit more about how the routers that customers come across fit together and what we name them.
We have our equipment in three datacentres:
Maidenhead hosts various servers and isn't involved in general internet access for customers. Telehouse and Equinix are both in London and form our core network.
The two London sites each have interconnects to our wholesale carriers, they each have LNS and BGP routers as well as interconnects to the internet, via Internet Exchange Points, transit providers and direct connections to some of the large content providers.
Through FireBrick Ltd, we design and make our own range of routers. We deploy these extensively throughout our network as LNS and BGP and VoIP routers.
As of March 2024 we have a pool of around 18 FireBrick FB6000 and 7 FireBrick FB9000 LNSs named either Gormless or Witless. These are the routers that customers connect to when their router logs in to us. The Gormless routers handle customers with speeds of 80M and below, whilst Witless routers handle faster connections.
We then have around 13 BGP routers, named Aimless. These are mostly FireBrick FB9000 routers and they connect our network to the rest of the internet via the multiple connections we have to Internet Exchange points, transit providers and content providers.
In addition to this, we have numerous other routers, servers and networking equipment that is used to provide our services.
We tend to run our connections at less than 50% utilisation at peak. Most of our routers and LNSs are also running at less than 50%. This allows ample of overhead when needed.
We connect to most of our suppliers and providers at each of our two London data centres. This allows us, and our suppliers, to carry our maintenance or to have faults without our services being drastically affected.
