Nildram's double transports Bucks.Net into the ether
Aim
Doubling the capacity of its IP transit connection with Nildram's dual Ethernet switches, has enabled Bucks.Net Services to enhance its service and cut its costs.
"To the casual observer, it might look like magic," Maria Blackmore, network administrator at Bucks.Net Services Ltd, says. "Of course it isn't," she admits, "it's just complicated."
Transporting vast quantities of Internet traffic in a fraction of second may well be baffling, but rather than having faith in sorcery, Bucks.Net of Aylesbury relies on Nildram, the UK's leading supplier of high-performance Internet access and hosting solutions.
Dual Connection:
The two Buckinghamshire-based companies have established a close working relationship, which was most recently exemplified by the specification of Nildram's dual Ethernet IP transit connection, which Maria concedes is "pretty nippy". The twin 100BaseT Ethernet connections provide a robust and effective link over which Bucks.Net's customers' Internet traffic is passed and then transported over Nildram's backbone network. "Broadly speaking," Maria says, "it delivers our customer's traffic towards its final hub destination."
Installed just over a year ago, the two 100Mbits/sec links were required to keep pace with increasing customer traffic and to provide scope for future growth.
Replacing a single-line connection, Maria says the dual link has significantly enhanced Bucks.Net's Internet connection and has enabled the company to provide an improved service. "Twice the capacity equals twice the reliability," she explains.
"With the dual connection, we're closer to Nildram's backbone network, which means we're closer to the rest of the Internet," says Maria. Consequently, the time taken for Nildram's traffic to reach the Internet - otherwise known as the network's latency - has been dramatically reduced, leading to noticeable improvements in performance and new business opportunities.
"With a lower latency, we get better performance from web pages," she notes, "which means better performance for both our customer's and our web servers. It has also helped us to host clients that employ voice-over-IP applications, which is fairly recent addition to our portfolio of services."
Differentiating Nildram from other ISP's
Describing the support provided by Nildram as "friendly, co-operative and responsive", Maria goes on to say the ability of the solution provider to separate UK Internet traffic from international traffic, differentiates Nildram from other ISPs. "Nildram can split UK and international traffic, which is important because it's cheaper to transport UK traffic than to send international traffic. Nildram passes those savings on to us."
Nildram also supplies Bucks.Net with several 48U 19" racks to house servers, routers, switches and customers' machines, indeed "everything that makes an ISP", as Maria puts it. The combination of a reliable dual Ethernet connection and the rack-mount systems exemplifies the healthy relationship between the two companies, which Maria is keen to praise.
"Nildram has a history of being responsive," Maria says. "The relationship we have with them is very good. It works well."
The services from Nildram enable us to react faster and share data With a lower latency, we get better performance from web pages, which means better performance for both our customer's and our web servers.