In the time before PMP/P2P there were leased lines, and these were point to point connections over ATM or Frame Relay terminated by NTU's at each site and that worked great, but today there are a wide range of options available to the majority of premises. 

P2P is Point to Point and is often used to either connect a single site to the Internet or two or more sites together. 

PMP or Point to Multipoint is a connectivity solution that allows for private connectivity between two or more sites with ethernet presentation over various mediums. Probably the most common medium is NE (National Ethernet) over MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) which permits simply and secure connectivity between sites with Layer 2 switching. 

If you are unsure what connectivity you require then please contact us (bottom right) and we can discuss the options. 

Physical Connectivity

Connectivity can be any combination of 

• Broadband - bandwidths up to 120Mbps
• Cable - bandwidths up to 350Mbps
• Microwave - P2P usually with bandwidths up to 1Gbps
• WiMAX - Long range Wifi with bandwidths up to 100Mbps
• P2P Laser - Similar to Microwave with bandwidths up to 100Mbps
• MPLS - Provides a lower cost shared connectivity solution with increased contention but lower rental overall. Favoured where available and where latency is not critical. 
• 4G/5G Cellular - Each channel can be up to 34Mbps on 4G but with aggregation we can often achieve the required bandwidth. 5G is an evolving technology and currently we can achieve 100Mbps where deployed. 
• Sattellite - Desipite the latency which can be up to 2500ms, Satellite can provide connectivity where there are no other options. 
• ELM/EFM - Lower cost connectivity provided over copper to the premises with bandwidths up to 100Mbps per channel. Aggregation up to 4x is provided as an option with bandwidths up to 320Mbps. 
• Syncrhonous DSL - Low cost synchronous connectivity where EFM/ELM/FTTC is not available. Aggregation can increase available bandwidth to site up to 96Mbps. 
• Fibre optics - FTTC & FTTP provides low cost, low latency, contended or uncontended bandwidths up to 80Mbps. Aggregation up to 4 x is possible and recommended. 
• Private Circuit - Over Copper of Fibre with bandwidth options of 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1Gbps and 30Gbps is available. Aggregation is possible up to 4 times or more. 
• EPS Copper Pairs - Increasingly hard to provision as Openreach phase this option out can provide one or two pairs between sites in one locality and can provide a very cost effective point to point over short distances. 

When the network configuration is complete the customer has the option of either routing or switching the network traffic between sites. For efficiency and resilience over PMP routing is preferred and is mandatory when one or more of the endpoints is the Public Internet but in smaller networks Switching works just fine. 

Encryption and Protection

• L2TP/IPSec is an optional tunnel encryption for point to point circuits with High Encryption with MHAC-SHA1/SHA2, TripleDES-CBC, AES-CBC, AES-GCM or ChaCha20 + Poly1305 cyphers. 
• MLE (Multi Layer Encryption) can be added to any/all of the spans to provide increased security and privacy should the customer require it.
• CLE (Cascading Layer Encription) can be optionally added to provide rotating key cascaded encryption for ultimate protection of data when travelling over public networks. 

Management Options

P2P & PMP is provided in two main and distinct flavours: 

• Fully Managed - In this case the entire end to end circuit is managed by us and we monitor it 24/7 at our NOC. Routing and fallback is managed by us so you have no need to get involved in fault management. 
• Part Managed - In this case then circuit connectiivty is managed by us, but the customer is responsible for managing the routing/switching. BGP is available in this configuration when required. 

Whichever management option, bandwidth, medium and term you select will determine the overall cost of the circuit and for that reason we will quote each scenario seperately. 

Support

The majority of PMP connectivity options can be augmented with enhanced service levels upto 24/7 1 hour response as needed. We will always design and implement fault tollerant connectivity which comes with enterprise class uptime guarantees. We will always where possible use distinct network carrier paths for fault tollerant connectivity to ensure our uptime guarantees are maintained. With NOC Management we are aware of any circuit issues before the end user and will have initiated a response moments later through the use of contingency automation.