We're investing in the future of our UK network

Computle is the best workstation platform in the world. We’ve spent years perfecting the hardware, the stack, and the management tools. But there has always been one variable we didn't control: the path between our facilities and your office. To improve performance, we are investing six figures into our UK network. Here, we explain more.

How the internet works

To reach Computle - and any website on the internet - your device sends data across a series of public routers, each represented by an Autonomous System (AS) number. Each router is owned by a different network carrier, who carry your traffic to its destination. With any form of internet - be that consumer or professional - your ISP (Internet Service Provider) is only responsible for transiting data across its own network.

To reach other AS networks, the ISPs enter relationships with other carriers. Without this, you would only be able to reach other customers on the same ISP. For global connectivity, ISPs purchase transit from tier 1 providers who have a global internet backbone, such as Cogent, Zayo or Lumen. For regional connectivity, ISPs connect with tier 2 or tier 3 carriers, who operate local, regional networks. An example of this would be TalkTalk, Virgin Media or Community Fibre.

Traffic to Computle goes through these providers, and they decide how to route your traffic based on their own commercial relationships. If a carrier in the middle decides to reroute traffic through a congested node to save costs, your session can lag. In other instances, you may see warnings about network latency. It isn't a failure of our platform, but a lack of control over the "middle mile."

The lazy solution

Most solution providers opt to have the customer pay for a private link between their office and their data centres, but this often means a company spending £500-£1k a month on secondary connectivity, in addition to their main office internet.

I think this approach is wrong.

• It shifts the burden to the client, when the service provider should be finding solutions.
• It's expensive and often doubles their connectivity cost.
• And it's a lazy solution.

It's expensive for a non-ISP (our clients) to create private network links. Their offices are not data centres and they are not designed for enterprise connectivity. Instead of every client paying for a private link between them and us, it is more cost effective and practical for Computle to create a private connection between us, and their ISPs. This forward-thinking solution reverses the approach and provides the same benefits at a fraction of the cost and complexity.

Without layer one, someone else is making the routing decisions

Right now, your connection to Computle relies on BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). BGP is designed for resilience, not performance. It finds a way to get the data there, but it doesn't care if that way is the fastest or most stable for remote working.

If you're in London, your packets can jump through four or five different networks before they hit ours. We can optimise our end, and you can optimise yours, but we’ve had no say in what happens in between.

Our solution: we took control of the pipe

By landing our own hardware in Telehouse - the heart of the UK's internet - we've removed the middleman carriers entirely. Your ISP hands off to us there, and from that point your traffic travels exclusively on our own dedicated 100G layer 1 fibre all the way to UK-B. We are no longer reliant on your ISP's carriers, as Computle becomes the carrier.

This results in:

• No BGP hops: your ISP hands off to us at Telehouse, and it hits our fibre
• No congestion: it's a 100G circuit dedicated to Computle traffic
• No variance: the latency from London to UK-B is now a constant 7ms

And for those wondering why Layer 1? We chose this to reduce variance. Cheaper solutions involve Layer 2, where our traffic would be routed across a series of dedicated routers, all controlled by one vendor. Whilst this gives us the same outcome, it comes with increased latency. With layer 1, we are renting a private fibre circuit between the locations, with our packets only traversing fibre optic.

Matching the infrastructure to the platform

A world-class platform deserves a world-class network. This six-figure investment is about closing the loop. We now control the hardware, the software, and the physical path the data travels. This service will go live in the next few months.

To learn more about our service, visit Computle.com.