Fibre-optic networks provide high-capa-city and high-speed direct access to co-located networking and data centre infrastructure, which enables carrier-grade network and data centre infrastructure to be provided as a monthly service, reducing capital and operational costs, says Internet services provider and co-location and hosting specialist company XDSL commercial director Danie Fourie.

Customers access the infrastructure through a direct low-latency fibre-optic connection, which means that they can use XDSL’s infra-structure as a commodity, owing to the high speeds of access, says XDSL director Martin van Dyk.

“We provide carrier-grade services and host-ing to customers at speeds of up to 100 Mb/s. We aim to increase this access speed to 500 Mb/s during the first quarter of next year,” he says.

Customers can control their use of various services and infrastructure, enabling them to control costs on a monthly basis.

“This model of providing hardware and network capacity for customers as a service and on demand requires that clients are able to manage these services from their offices using high-speed fibre-optic connections. The model also requires XDSL to provide high and reliable levels of service,” says Fourie.

XDSL has created a set of management programs to enable the monitoring and management of its infrastructure and ensure that it maintains high levels of service for clients, says Van Dyk.

“While the costs of hosted infrastructure are lower than in-house infrastructure, user experience depends on the quality of support services.

“The XDSL management tool automatically notifies the XDSL support teams and the client of any issues detected and automatically escalates these issues within minutes if they are not addressed, enabling us to maintain carrier-grade levels of service,” explains Van Dyk.

Clients can use XDSL’s management tool to increase or decrease their use of various services while billing is automatically adjusted, says Fourie.

“This self-service management also enables companies to use our hosting services to provide cloud networks and services for their customers or for their organisations. “We have specifically designed our infra-structure architecture and management tool to enable customers to provide cloud services and low-latency access for databases so that customers have a similar quality of performance, compared with in-house-hosted infrastructure, but at significantly lower costs,” he explains.

XDSL’s hosting centre has access to all the different carriers’ fibre-optic networks, enabling the company to provide choice for cus- tomers. Customers can also select the bandwidth of the fibre connection to XDSL’s hosting centre – 10 Mb/s, 25 Mb/s, 50 Mb/s or 100 Mb/s – depending on their required capacity, he adds.

“XDSL will continue to focus on its service levels, as service experience is the keystone for providing carrier-grade infrastructure and data storage services. “Customers can control expenses more effectively as they grow, and at lower prices than [those for] deploying these services on their own infrastructure.

“XDSL invites companies to use the capacity that it has available in its hosting centres. “The company’s data centres are open for use by other Internet service providers, enabling them to reduce their infrastructure and management costs,” says Van Dyk.

XDSL’s open-standard management tools are compatible with all operating systems, including those of enterprise resource giant SAP, office software giant Microsoft and information technology equipment giant Dell’s virtual machine systems, concludes Fourie.