Overview

What is Equinix Internet Access?

Equinix Internet Access provides access to the Internet using 1G, 10G and 100G ports with support for single or dual port connections. Multiple internet service providers are used at every location to ensure redundancy. Different protocols are supported, including Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), VRRP (static and direct), and Direct and Static routing.

The configuration options offer these advantages:

• High availability due to multiple upstream providers
• Good performance, because Equinix Internet Access routers integrate with the local Equinix peering exchange for potentially shorter routes
• Convenient one-stop shopping for support and billing

Access Point Types

Equinix Internet Access is available through a dedicated port, a Fabric port or a Network Edge device.

• EIA with Dedicated Port ensures that the entire port bandwidth is dedicated to handling EIA traffic. Note that this EIA service type involves procuring a new port and thus provisioning an EIA service can take a few days.
• EIA with Fabric can help you optimize your resource usage as the same Fabric port can be used in multiple connections to different services. EIA with Fabric port can be provisioned a few minutes.
• EIA with Network Edge enables convenient access to EIA service without the need of deploying physical hardware in an IBX data center. Deploy a Network Edge device of your choice, order EIA service and manage both remotely. Similarly to EIA with Fabric, provisioning EIA with Network Edge service takes a few minutes.

Port Configurations

Equinix Internet Access is offered in the following port configurations:

• Single-port configuration – You can connect through a single Cross Connect to a single port on the Equinix Internet Access platform.
• Dual-port configuration – You are set up with two Cross Connects that are connected to two independent ports on the Equinix Internet Access platform. Applicable to Equinix Internet Access via dedicated port.

Link Aggregation Group

Link Aggregation Group (LAG) configurations are supported on 10G and on 100G Equinix Internet Access ports. For 10G ports, up to 10 ports can exist within one LAG. In case of 100G ports, the maximum is 4 ports. Your equipment must support Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP). The ports within your LAG can't include Equinix Internet Access ports in different metros. The ports must all terminate to the same Equinix Internet Access switch or router.

An Equinix Internet Access service that uses LAG is still considered to be a single Equinix Internet Access service, and doesn't need to be viewed as multiple services corresponding to the number of ports in the LAG.

In dual-port configurations, both primary and secondary ports must have the same number of ports. Example: When 3x10G forms a LAG on the primary side, there must be a 3x10G LAG on the secondary side.

Billing Types

Supported billing types include: fixed bandwidth and price, usage-based billing, burst billing.

Fixed Bandwidth and Price - Traffic is capped to the selected bandwidth commit, and no bursting will occur. Consume and pay a fixed price per month.

• Ideal for companies with predictable, stable traffic.
• Monthly Recurring Charge is based on the maximum bandwidth commit you purchase. You pay fixed price each month.
• Equinix leverages traffic policing to keep your traffic within the committed value. Therefore, packets will be dropped if the amount of traffic that passes through your port exceeds the purchased bandwidth commit.

Usage Based Billing - Price and bandwidth are not fixed. Traffic will be billed based on port speed and data usage.

• Optimal for companies with lower monthly traffic and the backup use case.
• Usage billing consists of a base Monthly Recurring Charge and a fee for each GB of data transferred, based on the amount of data that ingresses or egresses the Internet.

Burst Billing - Burst billing allows you to exceed the selected bandwidth commit without capping the traffic for optimal user experience. Monthly price can vary.

• Recommended for companies with occasional traffic spikes.
• Equinix samples bandwidth usage every 5 minutes, collecting 8,640 samples per month. At the end of each month, these samples are aggregated and ranked from highest to lowest Mbps. The top 5% of samples (the highest 432 samples) are discarded.
• After discarding that percentage, the highest value is taken as the month’s bandwidth usage. If this value burst beyond the purchased bandwidth commit rate, Equinix bills that excess. This additional charge equals to the bandwidth tier where the 95th % value landed, subtracted by the Monthly Recurring Charge for the purchased bandwidth commit.

Network Architectures

Equinix Internet Access supports the following network architectures, each of them can use Provider Assigned (PA) or Provider Independent (PI) IP addressing:

Single-port architectures:

• Direct (flat network)
• Static
• BGP

Dual-port architectures:

• VRRP Direct (flat network)
• VRRP Static
• BGP

IP Address Allocation

The available IP assignments supported by Equinix Internet Access are:

• Provider Assigned (PA)
• Provider Independent (PI)

The available IP address types are:

• IPv4
• IPv6

In case of the Provider Assigned configuration, the table below shows the IP addresses (subnet sizes) you are given to connect your device to Equinix Internet Access routers as well as additional IP addresses that you can lease from Equinix:

Port Configuration	Default IP Address Assignment	Provided IPv4 Addresses	Provided IPv6 Addresses	Available Additional IPv4 Addresses	Available Additional IPv6 Addresses
Single-port Direct	IPv4 and IPv6 (dual-stack)	/30	/64	/29, /28, /27, /26, /25, /24 (optional)	/48 (optional)
Single-port Static	IPv4 and IPv6 (dual-stack)	/30	/64	/30, /29, /28, /27, /26, /25, /24	/64, /48
Single-port BGP	IPv4 and IPv6 (dual-stack)	/30	/64	/30, /29, /28, /27, /26, /25, /24	/64, /48
Dual-port VRRP Direct	IPv4 and IPv6 (dual-stack)	/29	/64	/28, /27, /26, /25, /24 (optional)	/48 (optional)
Dual-port VRRP Static	IPv4 and IPv6 (dual-stack)	/29	/64	/30, /29, /28, /27, /26, /25, /24	/64, /48
Dual-port BGP	IPv4 and IPv6 (dual-stack)	2 x /30	2 x /64	/30, /29, /28, /27, /26, /25, /24	/64, /48

In case of the Provider Independent configuration, you need to provide your own subnet, which must be at least IPv4 /24.

Use Cases and Recommended Configurations

Equinix Internet Access provides pre-defined configurations for three most common use cases:

Primary Internet Access – for customers that want it to be their main source of internet access.

• Recommended configuration (can be modified): Fixed bandwidth and price, 1G port, dual-port configuration, 500 Mbps bandwidth commit, VRRP static routing configuration

Backup Internet Access – for customers that use other internet provider as the primary one and want Equinix Internet Access to be a backup solution in case their main internet access becomes unavailable.

• Recommended configuration (can be modified): Usage based billing, 1G port, single-port configuration, no bandwidth commit (N/A), BGP routing configuration

Management Access – for customers that need an independent, back-door support for managing their servers and network devices collocated in Equinix IBX.

• Pre-defined configuration (cannot be modified): Fixed bandwidth and price, 1G port, single-port configuration, 15 Mbps bandwidth commit, Direct routing configuration

Main and Backup use cases are fully configurable. Management Access is not configurable and has a predefined configuration (currently the same) for each IBX.