North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

  • From: Henry Yen
  • Date: Thu Apr 05 05:28:43 2001 
On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 11:31:27AM -0400, Stephen Griffin wrote:
> In the referenced message, Roeland Meyer said:
[ snip ]
> > No, but individual circuits go down all the time. Simply because you have a
> > big name provider, doesn't mean that they will be more reliable. Only the
> > reasons for the outage change. 
> > 
> > The recommendations for multi-homing remain the same.
> 
> No one has said that multiple circuits via multiple entrance facilities
> via multiple carriers is a bad thing. It certainly does not affect
> routing table growth. Hell, even having those circuits go to different
> sites at the same provider takes care of the vast majority of issues.
> The few issues left (widespread routing failures) tend to be infrequent
> amongst the majority of providers.
> 
> Again, very little reason to need multiple providers if the provider
> is good. If you're concerned about circuit grooming, write it into
> your contract with _severe_ penalties for failure to meet the terms
> of the contract.

for most non-huge businesses, this is not do-able.  SLA contracts seem
to be pretty non-malleable.  for the rest, they're already peering via
multiple connections, so it's less of an issue, i'd think.

i don't think most providers will do actually do anything special in
the face of "severe written penalties".  outages happen.  the cost
of the penalties will merely be written into the cost of that custom
SLA.  (i.e., it's the same as an insurance policy, much like the
delta cost for a "business" vs. "residential" DSL).

also, for the smaller business, the loss of just a few customers due to
uplink outages are much more severe than for a huge NSP.  multi-homing
is a practical and useful tool.  every large provider in this area
has had at least one hours-long regional problem in the last year.
multi-homing exponentially lessens the chance of total failure.
as for the "cost" to the "network" regarding routing table size,
the cost is already charged to the end customer, in the form of (IMHO)
the high relative cost of dedicated lines to end-users ($1200 for 1.536MB).

-- 
Henry Yen                                       Aegis Information Systems, Inc.
Senior Systems Programmer                       Hicksville, New York