IP TRANSIT

What's the difference between Bandwidth & Transit?

In both cases, we provide high speed connectivity to the Internet via CAT5e copper cable to a colocated or dedicated server in one of our racks, the connection is standard ethernet and can be either 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s.

Where customers have their own racks, we connect direct to them via CAT5e copper or fibre cable within any of the data centres where we have a POP (Point Of Presence).

When we supply bandwidth, we provide the IP addresses that the customer will use and configure on their servers. The IP addresses come from our own allocation from RIPE, whom we are members of. As a LIR (Local Internet Registry) Caladan is authorised to assign blocks of IP addresses to our customers.

We also have our own ASN (Autonomous System Number) which enables us to route our (and our customers) IP addresses around the world by peering (interconnecting) with numerous other ISP's and Telco's. These interconnections are carried out either directly by running a cable between one of our routers and another ISP's router (private peering) or by connecting our routers to Internet Exchange Points, where many other companies also connect, thus enabling traffic to be exchanged.

We are currently members of the following exchange points: LINX ( www.linx.net ) LIPEX ( www.lipex.net ) AmsIX ( www.amsix.net ) FreeIX ( www.freeix.net )

By peering with other networks at these exchange points we are able to provide the fastest routes for our customers, which results in traffic in and out of the UK and Western Europe being excellent quality (ie: low latency, low lag, short ping times).

We also buy international transit from tier one providers, we interconnect with these providers via Gigabit fibre connections, which gives us excellent capacity and speed. We currently have two upstream transit providers, Level(3) and Tiscali International enabling us to pick the best routes available to us and have multiple redundancy, ie: in the highly unlikely event that one provider failed we still have full connectivity!

Caladan are pleased to be official resellers for Tiscali International, please contact sales for details of how to buy Tiscali International transit direct over our layer two infrastructure.

We also utilise sections of Tiscali's high quality fibre network to enable us to connect to our POPs abroad, if you need high speed/high quality layer two interconnect services to Europe and the US please contact sales for a competitive quotation.

We are also able to resell these tier 1 providers transit over our layer two infrastructure, giving you the customer a direct connection to the tier 1 providers network, please contact sales for further details.

When we provide transit, the customer already has their own ASN and is often a member of RIPE as well, we become one of their upstream transit providers. By announcing our customers ASN to all our peers and our upstream providers we are able to provide full Internet connectivity to our customer.

We can also announce our customers ASN just to our peers (ie: not to any of our upstream providers) this results in what is known as Partial Transit and because we are only then providing connectivity via fixed cost routes (ie: Internet Exchange Points and private peering connections) we can offer this at a much lower price. Our customer may, for example, already have full international transit from another provider, but typically would pay more for this connectivity.