Network Design and Redundancy
Skyway West Network Diagram [opens in a pop-up window]
Skyway West's network is engineered to provide businesses stable and reliable Internet and private networking services.
We use three upstream providers and if one or more experience problems our customer's Internet traffic automatically routes through the remaining providers. The three providers are:
* Telus
* Bell Canada
* Level 3 (a premier US carrier)
We also Peer in Vancouver and Seattle. Peering is where you exchange traffic directly instead of sending through the public Internet. In Vancouver, we peer with Shaw Communications (cable), Metrobridge Networks and Terago Networks (wireless provider), Peer1 and Netnation (web hosting services), Thinktel (VoiP provider) and other local Internet companies.
Our Seattle peering brings us closer to US networks and content distributers like Akamai Technologies, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Yahoo! Inc. and many others.
Connecting to multiple providers ensures that our Internet traffic is sent/received through the shortest path from/into our network. The result is faster connections and lower latency critical for many business applications (e.g., file server, VPN, VOIP). Our choice of upstream providers gives our customers excellent connectivity from our network to locations served by Telus, Bell Canada, AT&T Canada, Sprint, Shaw and others.
Skyway upstream providers and peering partners are each connected to a primary and back up Internet gateway BGP router. The back up BGP router automatically takes over routing traffic to/from the Internet if our primary BGP router fails.
Our Internet access customers are also supported by primary and back up Customer Distribution routers responsible for routing traffic between Skyway customers and to the Internet BGP routers. If the primary Customer Distribution router fails, the back up router takes over within seconds.
Skyway utilizes backup machines in other areas critical to business. For example, our VPN server which allows secure connections into our private network is backed up by another machine.
All of Skyways equipment, routers, and servers are connected to power surge protectors, battery backup and generator power backup. If grid power fails, the fail over to emergency generator power without an interruption in service.
Choose from the links at left to learn about our network and the reasons we believe it is second to none.
Static IP addresses are included with all our Business Class Internet services. Some of our competitors use Dynamic IP addresses which can result in unreliable and interrupted service.
Static IP addresses are essential if you host your own mail or web server and also necessary to make an application like a corporate database or accounting program accessible over the Internet.
Static IP addresses make it possible to connect branch offices, home users and remote employees to your LAN. Network administrators using PC Anywhere or a similar application can connect to the office servers and maintain them from home. Remote users can authenticate their access to the office network.
Static IP addresses allow Skyway to most effectively manage our Business Class Internet services. They allow us to continually monitor your service and determine if any problems are due to our equipment, your firewall or the cable between them.
Network Security: Basic network security is applied throughout our network. Connections include Internet Protocol Routing security options such as address or protocol blocking.
Enhanced network security is available. Inquire about firewalls, proxy servers and Virtual Private Networks using ADSL, Wireless or Fibre technologies.
Web Server: Our web server is a high performance machine running the latest software. We offer security certificates, programming and database support. More information can be found here.
Mail Server: Our mail server uses the new Internet Standard Mailserver Postfix. Postfix offers high security, high availability, and far more features than the old standard, Sendmail. More information can be found here.
We offer Anti-Virus products from commercial vendors like Trend Micro along with leading Open Source Anti-Spam tools like SpamAssassin.
Our Webmail solution uses the high-performance Squirrelmail.
QUALITY OF SERVICE AND SPEED TESTS
Although Quality of Service is tricky to measure because numerous interconnected networks comprise the Internet. Problems can range from a bad cable to a backbone router failure 6,000 miles away. Learn more about Quality of Service here.
From time to time you may want to test the speed of your Internet connection. Learn how to do this using our Speed Test.