When comparing Internet transit providers, it’s important to see what’s behind the scenes. How did they build their network?

At Digital West, we have architected our network by building in multiple layers of redundancy or “protection.” When circuits are purchased from various carriers, we’re often given the choice of protected vs. unprotected circuits. A protected circuit doesn’t mean that it’s a disparate route or path that the circuit travels, just that there could be a situation where a single piece of hardware could fail and still not drop the service.

Some companies choose to incorporate their own protection. While this is a more expensive way to build a network, it ensures more potentially disastrous situations can be encountered without impacting the network and, more importantly, customers. To provide the greatest reliability, Digital West builds our own protected paths into our network.

From its inception, our backbone connectivity was designed for the upmost redundancy. Diverse fiber entrances within our facility and disparate paths to the two different carriers that link us to our northern and southern Points of Presence (POPs) gave us a solid solution that keeps data flowing at all times. The worst case scenario (i.e. in the event that one of the links had a complete failure) would be that no more than 50% of our traffic would be diverted and redirected to reach us. And in under 3 minutes, the global routing tables would learn and broadcast the new routes for traffic flow to all Digital West IP’s and safely remain that way until the impacted link was brought back online.

Last year, we added in another layer to our backbone redundancy that created a full ring between our Northern California and Southern California hubs, spanning the Central Valley from end-to-end. We added this additional circuit, not to add another layer of protection or to create a new link to sell services on our backbone, but to eliminate that “up to 3 minutes” of partial traffic redirection. For some, this decision would seem expensive and excessive for the rare issue that could create a few minutes of delay. For our network, it was an important enhancement to what we feel is critical to our customers’ reliability.

Our timing couldn’t have been better as we experienced a network issue on our  pipe to LA a little over a month ago. During the short “outage,” all traffic instantly and smoothly re-routed over our Eastern California link to our Northern California POP and continued to flow without any customer impact. Our Senior Network Administrator, Will Orton, was happy to see how well the network performed as designed, and to see the close to 800 Mbps of transit flowing in and out with no impact. If you are interested, our network diagram can be seen here.

As we’ve grown, we could have chosen to build a far less expensive network (similar to some that are advertised), but that wouldn’t fit the level of quality and reliability we demand for our infrastructure services. We hope you agree.