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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: multi homing pressure
On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Elmar K. Bins wrote: > > Tier-2s should be given much more credit than they typically are in > > write-ups like this. When a customer is single homed to a tier-2 that has > > multiple tier-1 upstreams, and uses a delegated netblock from the tier-2's > > aggregations, that means one less ASN and one or more less routes in the > > global table. > > That's the operators' view, but not the customer's. > The customer wants redundancy. That's why SLAs exist. > So we should try to find a way to tell them "Hey, it's mostly Tier-1's > (or wannabes) that play such games, stick to a trustworthy Tier-2. > And, hey, btw., connect redundantly to them, so you have line failure > resiliency and also a competent partner that cares for everything else." Something like that, but not quite. Whenever one of these reports, which boil down to "everyone must multi-home!", appears, it typically has a stark lack of information on alternatives to *direct* multi-homing. Many customers would rather not multihome directly, and prefer "set it and forget it" connectivity. It's much easier to maintain a multi-pipe connection that consists of one static default route than a pipe to multiple carriers. The former requires simple physical pipe management, which can be left alone for 99% of the time. The latter requires BGP feed, an ASN, and typically much more than 1% of an employee's time to keep running smoothly. Obtaining single-homed connectivity from a Tier-2 mostly "outsources" network support, and small to medium size businesses tend to like that. It's not the only leaf end solution to the problem, but it's a viable one (and can be less costly to the rest of the world in turn). -- -- Todd Vierling <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
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