North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: sub-basement multihoming (Re: Verio Peering Question)
> I've noticed it, too... in some ways demand is even greater than > among small ISPs who have an inkling about how BGP works. > > > Is my estimation that for at least some broadband providers, > > per-household/per-customer BGP is a operational expense > > There are parties who are taking this into consideration. > > > capital purchase of new equipment, completely out-to-lunch (in > > advance of an interesting new product launch in the next few > > days)? > Re the "high cost" of multihoming... perhaps now. Most "smaller > places" can't afford to multihome given the current cost of two > T1s (hard to get BGP over broadband) and a Cisco that holds 128M > (even "smaller places" seem to concerned about brand recognition, > and are often reluctant to run Zebra). Without trying to start a flamewar, this is one of the places where NAT is exceptionally valuable. Setting up "redundant" connectivity for these users given a set of n consumer-grade, commodity connections (DSL, dialup, cable, etc) is rather trivial, and NAPT implementations have gotten robust enough to accomodate most of the common layer-ignorant protocols. This user doesn't want global route visibility, nor do they give a shit about filtering or allocation policies -- they want to be able to get to their pr0n when The Internet is broke. This `knowledgable' SOHO user is most likely already using NAT to get their office buddies online across the $40/mo DSL link -- likewise, the use of NAT for multihoming isn't introducing any new complications into their End-to-End Experience (tm). For inbound services, where address distribution and portability is of the most concern, SMTP is the most to worry about, and multiple equal-weight MX's (to each of the PA addresses) take care of the problem. For a business considering this, and interested in external services, if they haven't already signed up for the $20/mo Web Hosting account from the back pages of $PC_USER_RAG, convincing them to do so shouldn't be hard. Given these caveats, the one problem that consistently comes up is link-state inspection. For the low-end, people are using the ethernet - <DOCIS,ADSL,2-way Satellite> bridge they got with the connection. PPPoE makes this easier, as there's an interface on the router that will change state, but otherwise its a guessing game. This is where providers aren't even begining to play -- forget BGP peers to end-users, has anyone had any luck getting any of the consumer-grade 'broadband' providers to do so much as a RIPv1 default advertisment? Of course, while this does keep the global routing table free of non-aggregated micro-allocations, it does increase overall utilization. Cleaner solutions for effective multihoming in the future are certainly needed, but Multihoming For Dummies is quite obtainable today. > However, I've encountered [consulting] customers with multiple > _dialup_ connections who want to know if they can just balance > traffic across both. I think that the demand is there -- current > products just don't allow it. It might be pricey for that application, but their 1750 can do it just fine. The pre-packaged "Internet Router/Firewalls" flooding the market from Linksys/Netgear/etc haven't caught on yet, but its just a matter of time. ..kg.. <back to lurking>
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