Network

Our highly peered Tier 2 network spans four datacentres across the UK in a state-of-the-art multi-homed redundant ring.

 

The Freethought network

We recognise that our network is absolutely critical to everything that we do; our whole business depends on being able to connect our customers' services to the wider internet as quickly and reliably as possible. We take this responsibility very seriously and as a result we go to extraordinary lengths when designing our network in order to ensure that we do it right. As the saying goes why engineer when you can over-engineer?!

As you can see from the below diagram, our network comprises a redundant ring between our four datacentre locations, which provides highly redundant connectivity. Our network is multi-homed; we connect to three different Tier 1 transit providers (Cogent, GTT, and NTT), which ensures that we always have superb routes to other networks, and have maximum resilience with ample capacity if one of our transit providers experiences a problem. We also connect to four Internet Exchange Points (LINX LON1/Juniper, LINX LON2/Extreme, LONAP, and IXManchester), which provides us with direct connections to some of the largest internet providers and content networks in the world.

Testing our network

If you want to test our network for speed or latency you are welcome to do so. We recommend you ping LDeX1-Web4.uk.fi.net.uk (Our community mirror server) if you'd like to get an idea of latency from your network to our primary customer serving data centres. We don't recommend pinging our core routers as these are not where customer equipment is located, plus routers aren't very good at responding to ICMP so it's not a very reliable or effective test.

We also host a public speed test server, you can run one a test directly against that server at https://freethought-internet.speedtest.net

Our data centres

We are present in four industry leading data centres in the UK including one of the most connected data centres on Earth; Telehouse North, London.

Learn about our datacentres