North American Network Operators Group
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Re: multi homing pressure

  • From: John Payne
  • Date: Wed Oct 19 15:29:09 2005 
On Oct 19, 2005, at 12:20 PM, Todd Vierling wrote:
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.
Hrm, people keep saying that BGP is hard and takes time.

As well as my end-user-facing network responsibilities, I also have corporate network responsibilities here. All of our corporate hub locations are multi-homed (or soon will be)... and I honestly can't remember the last time I made any changes (besides IOS upgrades) to BGP configs for the 2 hubs in the US. (We're moving physical locations in the "international" hubs and taking new providers, so I'm discounting those changes as you'd have similar changes in a single homed statically routed move).

If you don't have multihoming requirements other than availability then it really can be fire and forget.