PSINet is the largest telco independent commercial ISP in the world, and now stands as the largest provider in the corporate market place. Supplying the business market place, with over 60,000 corporate customers, PSINet has invested in state of the art technology to meet the performance and functional requirements that are specific to commercial users of the Internet. Services are provided only to a commercial base, and there are no consumer users on its network and services, this greatly improves the quality and performance of the service to its corporate customer base.

With one of the largest hosting facilities in the UK, PSINet are able to offer web hosting which is second to none. The London Hosting Centre consists of nine floors, 11,000 sq. ft per floor and houses 4000 racks with up to 20 servers in each rack. There are 3 back-up generators, uninteruptable power supplies and three separate feeds from the national grid as well as independent on-site power generation. The Centre also has the ability to carry out off-site back-ups for all customers as well as having secure management infrastructure for facilities. The SP is situated separately with its own dedicated environment enabling routine maintenance and upgrades to be carried out easily. The level of computing requires both considerable power and extremely effective cooling systems - the building has a standard HVAC air-conditioning system with additional chillers in the basement. As with the SP, this kind of infrastructure provides a blank canvass on which customers can paint the picture they want for their web business, thereby enabling applications to grow exponentially in the future without ever having to make changes to the fundamental infrastructure, platform or environment.

Why PSINet?

One of the most important things to know about PSINet is that their network has been built specifically for Internet applications. It's the salient feature of the service, which sets them apart from telephone companies, systems integrators, and the dozens of smaller ISP’s.

PSINet owns and operates its own Internet network globally. Commercial partnerships exist with partners such as Unitech for the provision of supporting hardware; the Internet service itself is fully supported from within.

A Tier-1 Internet Provider relies on no other supplier to deliver Internet traffic, of which there are less than ten companies throughout the world. Not only is PSINet one of the leading global Tier-1 providers, but their backbone architecture is built using dedicated ATM/ Frame Relay systems, delivering significant performance advantages over ‘traditional’ Internet technology.

Many ISPs, typically telecommunications companies, will boast Frame Relay for Internet access, but they also use these networks to carry other types of traffic, including voice, mixed protocol private data, as well as Internet. PSINet is unique in the fact that they dedicate their global Frame Relay network, which is one of the world’s largest ATM networks, exclusively to TCP/IP Internet traffic. Furthermore, as they focus exclusively on the corporate market, it can boast the best possible option for high-performance commercial Internet access. The TCP/IP network based on ATM and Frame Relay technologies is the largest network of its kind in the world and a large proportion of profits each year are invested into the research and development of its network infrastructure.

Most other Internet providers are router-based, so customer traffic faces many short hops along its journey. Other Internet providers begin by leasing a dedicated data circuit and putting a router on each end. They then add new circuits and routers as they see fit. The result is an asymmetric network topology, which makes routing, more difficult to manage, makes redundancy difficult and provides multiple vulnerable points of failure. This unbalanced structure impairs throughput speeds, increases costs and inefficiently utilises bandwidth.

PSINet integrates broadband switches and high-performance routers in a POP-based logical network topology to optimise bandwidth and minimise hops and congestion. Such a state-of-the-industry resource requires meticulous engineering and scrupulous management. A 24 x 7 Network Operations Centre (NOPS) is maintained to continually monitor the performance of the network. As the primary nerve centre of the backbone, the NOPS assures customers that their service will be there when they need it. Also, detailed statistics can be made available for specific links; in general the network is operated not to exceed 30% utilisation at any one time.

PSINet has locations throughout North America, Canada, UK, Continental Europe, Japan and Asia as well as being able to provide connectivity in 250 other countries.