From Ireland’s internet exchange to a global supercomputing network.

INEX is where Ireland’s networks meet: broadband providers, mobile operators, content and cloud networks, hosting companies and public bodies. Around 110 networks exchange traffic across its switching fabric. If INEX has a bad day, so does the Irish internet.

We provide INEX’s operations team. We look after the exchange fabric, the route servers and the member-facing services, handle member connections and changes, and support INEX’s governance and security work.

A few highlights:

• Routing security. INEX’s route servers validate member routes with RPKI and IRR filtering, generated automatically by IXP Manager. We have presented this work at RIPE, UKNOF, APRICOT and the Global Peering Forum.
• ISO 27001. We helped create and we maintain INEX’s information security management programme, including scoping, risk treatment and incident-response tabletop exercises, and presented the roadmap at the Euro-IX forum and INEX member meetings.
• Tooling. IXP Manager was built by us in INEX, for this exchange, before it was used everywhere else.

Stellium runs a purpose-built data centre campus at Cobalt Park in Newcastle upon Tyne. It is also a UK landing station for subsea cables to the USA and the Nordics. We work with Stellium on three fronts.

The IP core

Stellium’s tenants, and anyone on Stellium’s extensive metropolitan area network, can buy internet access directly from the campus. We designed, built and manage the IP core behind that service. It is built resiliently across two separate meet-me rooms, so the loss of a room, a router or an upstream doesn’t take tenants offline.

NCL-IX

Stellium funds the Newcastle Internet Exchange for the good of the internet and interconnection in the North East of England, and asked us to build it. We did, and we run it, including member management, provisioning and onboarding.

Building management systems

A modern data centre depends on its building management systems: power, cooling, access and monitoring. We completely redesigned the network that carries them, and built and now manage a scalable, resilient network across every building on the campus.

Certification

As a UK data centre operator, Stellium certifies to ISO27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus. The networks we build and run for it are designed to meet and exceed those controls, and we support Stellium through certification.

DUG is a high-performance computing company. It designs, owns and operates some of the largest supercomputers in the world, and its geoscientists and engineers work from offices around the globe.

In 2009, DUG asked us to design what it calls the GWAN, its global wide-area network. The brief was demanding. Staff in London, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Houston, Perth and elsewhere use remote desktop environments across the links between sites, which need low latency and consistent performance. The same links also carry enormous elephant flows of data being moved for analysis. Each kind of traffic needed to be treated differently, without one swamping the other.

We designed a resilient global network spanning points of presence and data centres in London, Singapore, Perth and Houston, with offices in those cities and in Kuala Lumpur. We then built it, and we have managed it ever since.

Most of the UK’s interconnection happens in London. That means traffic between networks in the North East often travels hundreds of miles to get next door. NCL-IX changes that. It is fully funded by Stellium to foster interconnection in the region.

We designed and built the exchange, and we operate it day to day: the switching fabric, route servers and IXP Manager portal, member provisioning and onboarding, and support for the commercial side as well. It is the same work we do for INEX, applied to a newer exchange.

Westnet has served homes and businesses in Mayo and the surrounding counties for more than twenty years. It started as a wireless ISP. When it saw how broadband delivery was changing, with the National Broadband Plan and wholesale fibre from SIRO and openeir, it moved early to modernise. Today it delivers fibre to the home, VDSL and fixed wireless, combining its own wireless network with those wholesale networks.

Westnet is known for being customer-friendly and hands-on with onboarding and support. Our job is to make sure the network behind that service just works.

We manage Westnet’s core and edge network. That includes its points of presence in Dublin, which connect to transit providers and internet exchanges, and the core network elements in its PoPs around Mayo, where it interconnects with openeir and other wholesale providers. We also run its essential internet infrastructure: RADIUS for AAA, authoritative and recursive DNS, NTP, databases and more.

Telcom has provided voice and data services to Irish businesses since 1999 and is now part of the Radius group.

We run Telcom’s core network across multiple points of presence in Dublin, interconnected by resilient dark fibre and DWDM, and we manage its transit, internet exchange and BGP routing.

Our work goes further than the network. Telcom delivers its VoIP services on Colloquy, the voice platform we built and operate. We also built the CRM and provisioning system that ties orders to the network. Since 2020, Telcom has billed its customers on Billy from our sister company Island Bridge Billing Systems. The result is a single chain, from switch to invoice, run by one team that understands every link in it.

Cablecomm is a Longford-based provider of broadband, TV and phone services, mostly to residential customers with some businesses. Like Westnet, Aptus and Ivertec it serves its own region, but its access network is cable: DOCSIS delivered from a CMTS rather than wireless or wholesale fibre.

We manage the core network and the cable-specific pieces around it. We also run Cablecomm’s VoIP service, and Cablecomm bills its customers with Billy, the hosted billing platform from our sister company Island Bridge Billing Systems.

IXP Manager started as INEX’s internal provisioning and member portal. It is now a free, open-source platform used by internet exchanges large and small around the world, from start-up exchanges in emerging markets to some of the largest IXPs in Europe.

We lead the project, and our developers write most of its code. It covers member provisioning, switch and route-server configuration generation (with RPKI and IRR filtering), member portals, traffic graphing, PeeringDB integration and much more.

Why it matters to our clients

The same engineers who build IXP Manager are the ones running networks for our customers. Our software is written by people who are on call for the systems it manages, and our network engineering is backed by people who can write the tools to automate it.