Most businesses connect to their colocated equipment over the public internet — a VPN tunnel that routes traffic through shared carrier infrastructure with variable latency, shared bandwidth, and exposure to the routing dynamics of the public internet. For applications where the office-to-datacenter connection is high-frequency, high-volume, or security-sensitive, this is a meaningful limitation. A point-to-point connection replaces that path with a private, dedicated fiber circuit — your traffic, your bandwidth, your path.
What Is a Point-to-Point Connection?
A point-to-point connection is a private dedicated fiber circuit between two locations — in this case, between your office and Infinity Data Center. The circuit is exclusively yours: no shared bandwidth, no other traffic on the path, no dependency on public internet routing. From a network perspective, your office and the data center appear directly connected — the carrier infrastructure in between is transparent.
Infinity Data Center engineers point-to-point connections using carrier fiber infrastructure available in the East Tennessee region, working through our carrier partnerships to provision circuits to your office location and negotiate the rate and term on your behalf. The technical interface at both ends is Ethernet — your equipment simply sees a high-speed LAN connection to the data center. Dedicated circuits to other datacenters and to major cloud providers can be arranged the same way.
Why Private Fiber vs. VPN Over Internet
A site-to-site VPN over the public internet is a cost-effective way to encrypt traffic between your office and colocated equipment. But it comes with trade-offs that become significant at higher traffic volumes or lower latency tolerances:
- Shared bandwidth: Your internet connection's bandwidth is shared between the VPN tunnel and all other internet traffic from your office. During business hours, contention can affect throughput to colocated systems.
- Variable latency: Public internet routing is not deterministic. Latency can vary based on routing changes, congestion, and ISP peering decisions — making it unpredictable for latency-sensitive applications.
- Internet dependency: If your internet connection fails, the VPN fails. Equipment at the data center is inaccessible until internet connectivity is restored.
- Security surface: Traffic traverses public internet infrastructure, creating a larger attack surface even with encryption.
A point-to-point connection eliminates these constraints. Bandwidth is dedicated and exclusive. Latency is consistent and predictable — determined by the physical distance and circuit quality, not internet congestion. The path does not touch the public internet. And a point-to-point circuit is a separate connection from your internet service, meaning an internet outage does not affect your data center access.
Use Cases
- Database replication: High-volume synchronous or asynchronous replication between an office database and a colocated replica requires consistent, low-latency bandwidth that a VPN over shared internet cannot reliably provide
- Backup and DR: Nightly backup jobs that transfer large volumes of data to colocated storage benefit from dedicated bandwidth that does not compete with office internet traffic
- VoIP and real-time applications: Latency-sensitive communication applications require the predictable, consistent latency that private fiber delivers
- Documented private paths: When your own policies or contracts call for a private, documented network path for certain data, a point-to-point circuit with a documented route provides it
- High-frequency access: Staff who frequently access colocated systems for development, operations, or administration benefit from the consistent performance of a dedicated connection
Combined with Multihome
Point-to-point connections and multihome internet are complementary services that together eliminate network single points of failure in both directions. Multihome with BGP provides redundant public internet connectivity for your colocated equipment — if one carrier fails, traffic continues through the others. A point-to-point connection provides a private, dedicated office-to-datacenter path that is independent of your internet connection. Combining both means your office has private access to the data center even during an internet outage, and your colocated equipment has redundant public internet access even during an ISP event.
Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL)
For organizations with multiple office locations that need private connectivity to Infinity Data Center, Infinity Data Center's Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) service provides point-to-point connectivity across multiple sites on a shared Ethernet infrastructure. EVPL delivers the isolation of private circuits at a lower cost than separate dedicated circuits for each location, making it cost-effective for multi-site organizations.
Get Started
Point-to-point circuit availability and pricing depend on your office location relative to Infinity Data Center in Knoxville and the carrier infrastructure available at your address. Infinity Data Center's engineering team can assess circuit options and provide a quote for your specific location. See Point-to-Point Connections at Infinity Data Center, contact us, or call 866.790.4678 to discuss point-to-point options for your office and data center connectivity requirements.