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.
Our network connects you to:
We have our equipment in three datacentres:
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.
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.
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 July 2024 we have a pool of nine FireBrick FB9000 named Gormless. These are the routers that broadband (ADSL, VDSL, FTTP and CityFibre) customers connect to when their router logs in to us. Eight are live at any one time, with the ninth being a hot-standby backup.
We have separate sets of routers for our L2TP and Ethernet services.
We then have around twelve 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 run our network and 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% capacity. 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.
