North American Network Operators Group

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Further considerations for the future

  • From: George William Herbert
  • Date: Fri Sep 14 00:55:10 2001

I posted on Wednesday regarding some long term
network issues that I thought were raised by the NYC
attacks.  An additional one has occurred to me
from some subsequent events.

For organizations which are dependent on the net
for day to day operations (despite the dot-com
collapse, the number of these is steadily
increasing) the acceptability of single homing
is likely to have decreased significantly.
I addressed this a bit with the significance
of true separation in physical links that
I brought up in the first mail.

Beyond that, though, we have seen that whole
facilities can be outright destroyed or fail
due to cascading infrastructure and backups
failures as in 25 Broadway (are your generators
n+1 redundant...and do you stock spare water
pumps for them?).  This really means that
except for truly extraordinary ISPs, no end
customer can really be sure that an ISP is
going to be able to maintain services through
a major incident (or even a localized serious
incident).  Expect to see in the coming months
many more end customers desiring to get truly
dually homed, with redundant ISPs, redundant
local loops in different directions, etc.
We should be prepared to deal with the additional
routing and provisioning complexity involved
in handling additional customers doing BGP,
dual homing, etc., both new customers coming
for their second connection and existing
customers as they reach out to a second ISP
for the redundant connectivity.


-george william herbert
[email protected]