Data Services

Fluency offers a range of connectivity products catered to Small and Medium businesses.  With a focus on Ethernet-based delivery, we can dispense with the overhead involved in maintaining legacy technologies.  This allows us to provide a much more efficient support-base and offer exceptional value and performance.

Fibre-Based Ethernet

Fluency has relationships with a number of carriers to provide its customers with corporate-grade Ethernet access, with speeds available from 10Mb/s to 1Gb/s and higher.  These dedicated Ethernet ‘tails’ are delivered from one of our Datacentre Points of Presence (PoPs), allowing Fluency to provide all kinds of services over the connection.

As with the nature of fibre optic services, speed is guaranteed, bandwidth is symmetric and the connection is inherently very low-latency.  This makes Fibre-based Ethernet perfect for customers needing to take advantage of highly-available, or bandwidth-hungry applications.

Where many service providers offer Fibre-based Ethernet solely as a leased-line replacement, providing just Internet access, Fluency allows its customers to fully exploit the Ethernet capabilities of the service.  For example, additional VLANs can be provided to separate access for Voice, Internet, VPN etc.  Each of the VLANs can be treated with different Layer2 class-of-service (CoS) tags, allowing customers to push as much traffic as they like without impacting quality of service for crucial applications.

VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service)

Utilising its own PoPs in Edinburgh and London, and with access to several carrier’s national networks, Fluency can provide a unique VPN service known as Virtual Private LAN Service, or VPLS.  This is a new concept that will change the way businesses think about building their networks.

The easiest way to think of VPLS is like a big virtual Ethernet switch in the sky.  Fluency provides a fibre-optic connection to each of the customer’s sites, which connects you to the ‘switch’.  Just like a managed Ethernet switch, each tail or ‘port’ can be configured however you like, but the basic principle is that they act as a pseudo-wire, i.e. they carry all the VLAN tags, Class-of-Service labels and any other data sent by your own Ethernet equipment to the other sites.

Because of the national footprint Fluency have access to, your inter-site traffic will always go via the shortest path.  This means if you were to have a 3-site VPLS service between offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, traffic between Edinburgh and Glasgow would only travel across Scotland. Only Ethernet packets that are broadcasts, or specifically destined for the London office, would travel up and down the country.  This means you can benefit from a very low latency network, that would only be otherwise achievable by having individual dedicated connections between each of your sites in a fully meshed configuration.

VPLS ‘ports’ or ‘breakouts’ can also be provided in a number of carrier-neutral data centres across the country, including our own PoPs in Telehouse East, London, and Scolocate in Edinburgh.  Fluency can also provide Internet access for your whole organisation via these breakouts.

EFM (Ethernet in the First Mile)

Ethernet in the First Mile, or EFM, is a revolutionary business service that provides near fibre-optic quality connectivity for a fraction of the cost.

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 faster and more reliable service.

Fluency has two versions of this 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 offers Internet delivery over EFM. However, work is underway to provide EFM tails to a VPLS service (see above). In addition, breakout at any Fluency Point of Presence (PoP) is possible for colocation and virtualisation customers. Also, Fluency hopes to offer inter-site VLANs over EFM to allow further enhancement of the LAN Extension application.