In Spain, most people associate a “good connection” with having fiber at home and a speed test showing lots of megabits. But when you need to support critical platforms, high-availability environments, or global B2B services, the type of connectivity can be the difference between staying online or facing a major incident.
That’s where the network of an infrastructure provider like Stackscale plays in a completely different league compared to an FTTH residential line, even though both are marketed as “fiber” and both provide Internet access.
How a Typical Residential FTTH Line Works in Spain
From a technical perspective, a typical fiber connection for home or small offices in Spain usually relies on:
- GPON/XGS-PON technologies: a single fiber segment is shared among dozens of subscribers via passive optical splitters.
- A best-effort service model, with no strict guarantees on latency, jitter, or packet loss.
- High oversubscription: many customers share the same upstream capacity.
- Policies optimized for consumer usage:
- Traffic dimensioned for streaming, web browsing, downloads, gaming.
- In many cases, CGNAT for IPv4, which prevents publishing services directly unless you use tunnels or extra products.
- Basic support, often without strong commitments for resolving complex incidents.
In practice, this means:
- Good average performance for home use.
- Latency and jitter swings at peak times.
- A real risk that an outage or fault will leave the office or household completely isolated until the ISP fixes it.
What You Expect from Data Center Connectivity
In a professional data center environment, the context is very different. The network is designed for:
- Intense bidirectional traffic: data replication, backups, east–west traffic between nodes, APIs, end-user access, etc.
- Service-level commitments (SLAs): targets for availability, response times to incidents, and planned maintenance.
- Integration with complex architectures:
- BGP with customer autonomous systems.
- Private tunnels, extended VLANs, inter–data center connectivity.
- DDoS protection and advanced security policies.
Whereas a residential network prioritizes raw volume, a data center network prioritizes stability and predictability under load and during failures.
Stackscale’s Network: Multipoint Backbone with a Carrier-Class Mindset
Stackscale’s connectivity is built following carrier-grade network principles:
- A high-capacity backbone: multiple 10G/100G links (multi-100G) interconnect data centers and points of presence in a redundant way.
- Presence in multiple countries: distributed infrastructure in reference data centers in Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and more, enabling multi-region architectures.
- Multiple IP transit providers: outbound Internet connectivity does not rely on a single carrier, but on several national and international operators.
- Interconnection with major Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in Europe (e.g., ESpanix, DE-CIX, AMS-IX, LINX), reducing intermediate hops and improving latency to many networks.
- Full support for native IPv4 and IPv6, with the option to announce customer prefixes via BGP and set up redundant sessions.
On top of that, Stackscale adds:
- Network segmentation (separate planes for management, storage, and customer data).
- Integration with high availability solutions: synchronous/asynchronous replication between data centers, active–active scenarios, disaster recovery setups.
- Monitoring and telemetry across the backbone to detect saturation, physical errors, and degraded routes.
Technical Comparison: Residential FTTH vs. Data Center Connectivity
The table below summarizes high-level differences between both approaches in the Spanish context:
Table 1. Typical residential FTTH (Spain) vs. professional data center connectivity
| Parameter | Typical residential fiber (Spain) | Professional data center network (e.g., Stackscale) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary target | Households and very small businesses | Enterprise IT infrastructure and critical services |
| Access technology | GPON / XGS-PON | Ethernet/L2 links, DWDM, MPLS, IP transit, dedicated cross-connects |
| Bandwidth | “Up to” X Mb/s or Gb/s (often asymmetric in practice) | Symmetric, scalable (from 100 Mb/s to multiple 10/100G) |
| Contention / oversubscription | High (many customers per PON / uplink) | Tight contention control, oversized backbone links |
| Latency | Varies by time of day and load | Low and stable, optimized between DCs and to the Internet |
| Jitter | Not guaranteed | Minimized, especially on critical routes |
| Service model | Best effort | SLA- and continuity-oriented |
| Public IPv4 address | Frequent CGNAT on low-cost plans | Dedicated public IPs; customer-owned ranges possible |
| BGP / own AS support | Not available | Supported: BGP sessions, prefix announcements, multihoming |
| Provider redundancy | Single ISP | Multiple carriers and multiple egress paths |
| Physical redundancy | Usually a single fiber / ONT | Dual links, diverse paths, HA network equipment |
| Interconnection and IXPs | Opaque to the user | Direct connection to multiple IXPs and private peerings |
| DDoS protection | Limited or only in premium products | Mitigation on the backbone and/or dedicated services |
| Segmentation and isolation | Basic CPE, simple VLANs | Multi-VLAN designs, VRFs, separated network planes |
| Monitoring and telemetry | At operator level, no visibility for the end customer | Granular monitoring, with metrics exposed to customers depending on plan |
| Maintenance windows | Generic notifications (if any) | Coordinated planning, with impact assessment on critical services |
| Support | Generalist call center | Specialized technical support, usually 24×7 |
BGP and Multihoming: The Foundation of Resilience in Critical Environments
One of the clearest differences is in the routing layer:
- On a residential connection, the customer CPE does not speak BGP. All routing intelligence lives entirely inside the ISP; if that network has a large-scale problem, the user is simply “behind the blackout” with no real options.
- In a data center network, it is common to establish BGP sessions between the customer (with their own AS, or via the provider’s AS) and multiple edge routers. This allows you to:
- Announce IP prefixes redundantly.
- Steer traffic across different carriers based on prefix policies, BGP communities, metrics, etc.
- Implement true multihoming, where losing a single provider does not mean disappearing from the Internet.
With this foundation, a customer can, for example:
- Publish services via Stackscale and a second provider at the same time, sharing the same address space.
- Design continuity plans that cover international route cuts, congestion on specific carriers, or incidents affecting a particular IXP.
Inter–Data Center Connectivity: Beyond Just “Having Internet”
Another key technical aspect is private inter–data center connectivity (DC-to-DC):
- For database replication, distributed storage, or virtualization clusters, the quality of east–west links (between DCs) is just as critical as Internet egress.
- Providers like Stackscale use their backbone to offer low-latency, high-capacity links between their data centers, enabling:
- Replicated storage arrays across locations.
- Kubernetes clusters or hypervisor farms spread across multiple DCs.
- Disaster recovery strategies with aggressive RPO/RTO objectives.
This kind of connectivity does not exist on residential FTTH. Outside a data center environment, the alternative is usually VPN over the public Internet or dedicated point-to-point lines, with very different costs, latencies, and availability characteristics.
A Simplified Use Case: Same Application, Two Network Contexts
To see the impact, imagine a simple scenario: an e-commerce web application with a database and file storage.
Running on FTTH + on-premise server in an office:
- Total dependency on a single line.
- Variable latency towards end-users and payment providers.
- Real difficulties in implementing true high availability across different locations.
- Complex and costly to protect against DDoS without add-on services.
Running on infrastructure in a data center with Stackscale:
- Servers and storage inside the DC, connected through the provider’s backbone.
- Ability to deploy the application across two data centers and load balance between them.
- Service publication using BGP and multiple egress routes, reducing the risk of being cut off by a single carrier’s issue.
- Integration with network-level security services and additional protection layers.
The source code can be exactly the same; the difference lies in the failure surface and the network’s ability to absorb problems without taking the service offline.
Conclusion: Home Fiber Is Great for Streaming, Not for Running a Data Center
At the physical layer it’s easy to confuse “fiber” with “fiber”, but the design requirements of residential FTTH and those of a professional data center network could not be more different.
A home line is perfectly fit for purpose in its context: heavy consumption, low cost, low criticality. The network of a provider like Stackscale, by contrast, is built to:
- Treat business traffic as mission-critical, not just another entertainment flow.
- Deliver capacity, latency, resilience, and security in line with high-availability and business continuity architectures.
- Integrate naturally with the tools and protocols used by sysadmin and network teams (BGP, VLANs, multi-DC redundancy, detailed monitoring).
From a technical standpoint, that’s the core difference: a residential FTTH line simply “gives you Internet”; a well-designed data center network, such as Stackscale’s, keeps your business running even when the rest of the Internet is having a bad day.
