The mcix network is made up of three stacks of Cisco Catalyst 3750 switches one stack located at each of the three sites in which mcix is present:

• IFL1, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road
• IFL2, Reynolds House, Manchester Technopark
• TeleCity, Williams House, Manchester Science Park

The switch stacks utilise Cisco StackWise technology to create a single 32 Gbps switching unit, and all devices have dual power supplies. Sites are connected in a ring topology with 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnections running over diversely routed dark fibre sourced from two suppliers. By utilising RPVST (Rapid Per VLAN Spanning Tree) the time taken for the network to reconverge in the event of loss of one of the fibre links is sub-one second.