Major Network Upgrades Coming

Jawaid Bazyardata center, Internet Service, News

Dear Valued FORETHOUGHT.net Customers,

We have started a round of exciting network upgrades, which will increase our capacity and improve reliability.

After the outage issues of last month, we did a top to bottom engineering review, and decided on a number of architectural changes and improvements.

We are undertaking 6 major projects to beef up our network and deliver the best Internet connectivity: IP Core, IP Access, Direct Netflix Peering, Voice Quality Monitoring, FT Corp HQ DR, and MPLS Network Upgrades. I will write about one of these topics each week for the next 6 weeks.

IP Core

To handle the next phase of our growth, and to address an architectural issue we uncovered in our network auditing, we are purchasing an all-new IP Core. The routers for the new Core design will provide enhanced levels of redundancy, while allowing us to upgrade all our connectivity to 10G (10 Gigabit) levels. We expect the new IP Core to be implemented by mid-May.

These improvements will increase the reliability of Internet connectivity across our network, including our Internet access customers, our CloudFone VoIP PBX customers, and our data center customers.

New routers will be placed at our 2347 Curtis Data Center as well as at Colorado’s telecom central hub of 910 15th St – and the routers connected together with a dark fiber DWDM ring. Connectivity will be maintained even in the event of a complete router failure, or fiber cut.

And that connectivity is the best in Colorado, based on our private peering connections to other networks. We peer (interconnect and exchange traffic) directly with:

  • Comcast
  • CenturyLink
  • Telia
  • Level3
  • Cogent
  • Zayo
  • Google (all Google properties, including Google Apps, Docs, YouTube)
  • Microsoft (for office365, Azure, Windows Updates, etc)
  • Apple (all Apple iCloud, iTunes, etc services)
  • Yahoo
  • ViaWest
  • Hurricane Electric
  • Front Range Internet
  • Front Range Gigapop (Colorado’s universities)

So no matter where your traffic is going, or where your cloud server is hosted, or what web site you’re viewing, you’re going to have the fastest, lowest-latency connectivity available anywhere in Colorado – as low as only a few milliseconds!

Our connectivity is better than any 1 “Tier-1” (such as CenturyLink) can provide – because we are bringing you the connectivity of dozens of Tier-1’s combined.