Ask anybody that knows IT well and they will tell you that today, a colocation facility is only as good as its network.

Having just one single backbone provider is a good recipe for sheer disaster. It's not if but WHEN will that single backbone provider go down...

That's why our data center offers full and 100 percent redundancy thanks to five of Montreal's largest and strongest backbone providers.

On any given day, these five major backbones account for about 70 percent of all Internet traffic that transits through the City of Montreal.

Our network consists of a fully operational BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) that fully ensures 100 percent redundancy throughout all our network, 24 hours a day. Coupled to that are Cisco high-speed Gig-E switches, high-capacity Cisco routers and secure Cisco hardware firewalls.

In order of importance, our five main backbone providers are:

Peer 1

Level 3 Communications

Videotron (VTL) Ltd.

TeleGlobe Canada

Cogent Communications

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the core routing protocol of the Internet. It works by maintaining a table of IP networks which accurately designate network reachability among autonomous systems. BGP doesn't use traditional IGP metrics, but makes routing decisions based on path, network policies and precise rulesets.

BGP was created to replace the aging EGP routing protocol to allow fully decentralized routing in order to allow the removal of the NSF-Net Internet backbone network. This allowed the Internet to become a truly decentralized system. Most Internet users do not use BGP directly. However, since most Internet service providers must use BGP to establish routing between one another, it is one of the most important protocols of the Internet.