Who are the backbone providers of Aplus.Net ?

In the early days of the Internet it was very fashionable providers to distinguish themselves as multi homed and to list who are their vendors. It did matter in these early days of the Internet when there were too many start ups and too weak peering points.


Today, the technology is much more mature and this is not that important.

Aplus.Net has been trough this fashion and used to have as many as 4 simultaneous different providers, just to realize that the network becomes less stable with more providers. Furthermore the smaller providers cannot take over the load in case of a failure of a big provider. That's why Aplus.Net has abandoned the smaller vendors of backbone connectivity and keeps the largest one only. Actually it costs less to have multiple vendors because the largest backbones are typically the most expensive.

Aplus.Net uses the most expensive and the most reliable backbone provider UUNet. For the last 5 years UUNet connection was down 2 times for 15 minutes and for 9 hours respectively.

This has nothing to do with the reliability and the redundancy of Aplus.Net's network. Yes. Aplus.Net fiber and fiber equipment is completely redundant and we had a chance to prove it when a rat ate trough one of the underground fiber cables back in year 2000. There was no down time related to this incident.

Another trend in the industry is the commoditization of the bandwidth. There are exchanges for dynamically buying bandwidth and soon it may happen so that we are with UUNet in the morning and with AT&T in the evening. The role of the individual backbone will further diminish.

Finally Aplus.Net is in constant contact with all major vendors like Sprint, AT&T, Cable and Wireless and is weighting all the options to provide the best possible service to its clients.