We have been quietly building and testing our Near Line Of Sight (NLOS) Ethernet infrastructure over the past few weeks and months and are now able to offer this fantastic service to businesses in the local area.

We are thrilled to be say we’re the first in Edinburgh to offer this exciting new product.  With an abundance of wireless internet connections flooding the market from the mobile operators, it’s easy to forget that point-to-point wireless technology is fast emerging as a replacement for private circuits, leased lines, VPNs and now carrier Ethernet.

The exciting thing about Fluency’s Radio Ethernet product is that it can be delivered as an 802.1q VLAN at the customer’s premises, with the remote end terminating at ether of Fluency’s Edinburgh PoPs.  This means that Radio Ethernet could be used as a lot more than plain ol’ Internet:  It can be used as a private Ethernet connection to equipment collocated with Fluency, or even as a ‘tail’ on a larger VPLS infrastructure.

Currently, we have coverage for most of the New Town, Leith and adjoining areas of Edinburgh.  We also are hoping to open a further PoP that will cover the Old Town and South Side areas of Edinburgh.

We’re really excited about Radio Ethernet.  Please drop us a line if you would like to discuss it, or come and see it for yourself.

We have reserved plenty of rack space for Customers’ equipment at our own facility in our building at No 1. Broughton Market in central Edinburgh.  We also have some availability in our 24×7 manned datacentre space at Scolocate, in the South Gyle area of Edinburgh.

Fluency’s new EFM product uses a new connectivity technology, providing features, performance and reliability only previously available from expensive fibre-optic based products.

EFM uses multiple copper pairs to provide connectivity from the local telephone exchange to the customer’s premises. While many service providers provide a similar service by bonding traditional DSL lines together at the Layer 3 level, Fluency’s EFM bonds the lines at the physical layer, providing a much cleaner service.

Fluency EFM provides fully symmetric, full-duplex bandwidth. There are two versions of the product available that use two and four copper pairs to achieve speeds of up to 10 and 20 megabits per second respectively. Speeds are distance variable, however, most metropolitan areas can achieve at least 80% of the maximum speed.

As this is a real Ethernet service, delivery is RJ45 at the customer’s premises, on a rack-mountable Ethernet Demarcation Device (EDD). At the moment, Fluency only offer Internet delivery over EFM. However, testing is underway to provide a new Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) product that allows multiple EFM and Fibre Ethernet services to be combined to provide a LAN Extension service. In addition, breakout at any Fluency Point of Presence (PoP) will be possible for colocation and virtualisation customers. Also, Fluency hope to offer inter-site VLANs over EFM to allow further enhancement of the LAN Extension application.

Believe it or not, one of the main reasons for starting Fluency was our dissatisfaction with other ISP’s bandwidth charging policies.  Having been a customer ourselves, of many well-known business service providers, we have seen first-hand the kind of outrageous bandwidth charging schemes on the market.

To set the scene, most Ethernet and leased-line providers will charge per-megabit for accessing the Internet. Many of these are reasonable, a number of providers generate huge profits from ‘excess’ usage charges.  It’s our opinion that profiting from accidental or unexpected overage is unfair.  Whilst we have the same risks involved with offering ‘unlimited’ bandwidth as all providers, we feel using a ‘penal’ charging scheme is bad practice.

There are, of course, plenty of providers who offer ‘unlimited’ services, however Fluency has found from real-world experience that these can be equally as dubious as per-megabit tariffs.  A common approach is to have a (somewhat hidden) ‘fair usage’ policy, that really makes the prospect of ‘unlimited’ null and void, especially when the provider has a warped view of what ‘fair usage’ is.  Those providers who typically offer genuinely unlimited access adjust their economies by contending their networks, and often over-contending them.  This usually means the backhaul from local exchange, or inter-site link that carries the customer’s traffic to the Internet only has capacity for a fraction of the customers connected.  Whilst many providers will tell you somewhere in the small-print that it’s a contended service, many others will ‘pretend’ it’s un-contended, banking on the fact that they have engineered in a large enough margin for error, that customers should never see the effect of contention.  This works in practice for 99.9% of the time, but these days all it takes is a few dozen people streaming a Wimbledon final, or world-cup match for the contention to be plainly obvious to all.  It is especially obvious with many people using their ‘un-contended’ service for VoIP, where the bottleneck can literally be heard in every call.

It’s with all this in mind, that when building our pricing structures, we decided to create a fair and transparent bandwidth policy for all of our access products.  Our aim is to never charge a customer for excess bandwidth.

To address this, Fluency will always include enough usage in the standard pricing for all its access products to accommodate at least 95% of customers.  This means that when the global thirst for bandwidth increases, Fluency is bound by its own policy to keep the vast majority of its customers on an all-inclusive tariff.

If a customer falls into the 5% of high users, we will get in touch to discuss usage and find out whether it’s a long-term requirement.  In the one-off cases, or where usage is only expected to be high for a short period of time, Fluency will not take any action.  Only where usage is seen to be excessively high for a prolonged period, or where the customer is expecting high levels of traffic, we will discuss putting the customer on a ‘premium’ tariff that is completely unlimited.

Also, as an added bonus, any customer who takes Fluency Ethernet access in more than one location (including any of our Colocation PoPs), can request an additional inter-site VLAN for VPN, or high-speed backup transfers.  Because Fluency only monitors your main Internet-access VLANs, this means that customers are free to absolutely hammer their Ethernet or EFM access between sites with absolutely no concern for over-use.