Manchester:
Tel: +44 (0)845 260 4743
Fax: +44 (0)845 260 4744
London:
Tel: +44 (0)20 7043 4654
Alternatively contact us via this web site.
UK Grid is a tier 2 provider with a fully resilient multi homed network. We have multiple connections to tier 1 providers in both London and Manchester. The resilience of our network allows us to reliably provide our customers with IP based services in all of our many data centre locations.
Please see below for futher details on our network architecture.
UK Grid operates as ASN 39757 and is a member of RIPE.
You can view our RIPE whois records here
UK Grid uses four tier one providers in both London and Manchester.
Level3 is one of the largest IP Transit carriers in the world. The world's largest telecom carriers all continue to use Level 3 services, as do the 10 largest U.S. Internet Service Providers, and the 10 largest European telecom carriers.
Tiscali has the best performing backbone in Europe and their TINet IP/MPLS backbone extends over 19 countries in Europe, North America and Asia.
Global Crossing offer some of the best routes out to the US and Europe and is one of the largest global carrier one's.
Cogent's end-to-end optical network consists of multiple metropolitan IP-over-WDM fiber rings located in Cogent's major markets throughout the United States and Europe. Cogent currently has a presence in over 100 markets throughout North America and Europe.
UK Grid has four UK core network POPs for site, city and hardware resilience:-
Manchester - Telecity Williams and IFL
London - TelecityRedbus Harbour Exchange and Telehouse North
All POPs are highly resilient and scalable, consisting of high end Cisco routers in the network core and redundant layer 3 switches in the distribution layer. All edge switches providing the customer connections are dual connected to the distribution layer thus giving a highly fault tolerant network.
UK Grid maintains a low latency network by peering with many different organisations at multiple Internet Exchange Points. An Internet Exchange Point is an organisation that has multiple members that all connect to each other over a common network. Each organisation can then request to peer with one another over the network and exchange prefixes.
Once an organisation has agreed to peer and exchange prefixes with UK Grid, traffic to and from this organisation doesn't traverse the public internet but instead traverses our network backbone between London and Manchester. Previosuly, before a peer was established with the organisation, traffic would traverse the internet over multiple hops to reach the destination network, now traffic at a maximum only has to traverse the UK Grid backbone or best case the local POP router thus missing out multiple hops and minimising latency.
UK Grid is currently a member of the following Internet Exchange Points:
To find our more about peering with UK Grid at one of the Exchange Points listed above, please view our peering policy at http://as39757.net
We take the uptime of our network seriously and use various tools to monitor it 24 x 7 x 365. We have Network Monitoring Systems within our autonomous system that continuously poll our network and monitor various thresholds on our network devices. Also we have external probes that poll our network from outside of our autonomous system. All of these systems send alerts via different mechanisms to our network support team should any issues arise.
Click here for an overview diagram of our network topology.
If you are interested in colocating with The UK Grid Network LTD or require further information on colocation or our other
offerings, please contact our team on
+44(0)845 260 4743.
