North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

RE: multi-homing fixes

  • From: David Schwartz
  • Date: Fri Aug 24 21:35:02 2001

> On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 06:04:19AM -0400, Daniel Golding wrote:

> > Leo is exactly right. The real reasons that folks multihome are:

> > 1) Backbone and/or routing instability striking one upstream provider
> > 2) Local loop/fiber cuts

> > That's pretty much it.

> how about,
> 3) The desire to have the customers of backbone providers with
> rather different
>    customer bases be able to efficiently reach a target site?
>    (example: a US provider with lots of business customers, a dial-up/DSL
>              concentrator, and a European provider with lots os
> EU customers;
>              you might choose to buy transit from all three)

	There are many, many more reasons. To begin with:

 4) Desire not to be held hostage by your ISP when billing disputes or other
problems occur.

 5) Desire for additional leverage when negotiating with your ISP, "I can
pull my circuit to you right now and my network will not be affected. If you
can't match my latest offer from XYZ Corp, I'll just flip the switch."

 6) Ability to reduce the average number of hops between your networks and
various important other sites. Ability to reduce the points at which outages
or packet loss can occur.

 7) The comfort of knowing you won't have to worry about the latest crazy
idea your ISP dreams up. For example, "Starting thursday, we require all IPs
to have valid, matching forward and reverse DNS or we won't route to them".
I'm sure people have other examples of similar insanities.

 8) No need to worry about what happens if your ISP gets slow or
overcommitted. You just shut them off while you find another ISP to replace
them.

	There are more reasons. These are just a small number of them.

	DS