North American Network Operators Group

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Re: [NANOG] Multihoming for small frys?

  • From: Seth Mattinen
  • Date: Wed May 21 16:43:05 2008

Sean Figgins wrote:

Now, I have a question about this... Is the customer using the sites for redundancy, and will have both upstream providers in each site?


Honestly, a small operation like this may be better served by multiple connections to the same provider. Such a setup can usually be done to multiple routers, through redundant circuit paths, and done at substantially less cost that two different providers. And, in my experience, using one provider can often be more reliable than multiple providers, given how many providers transport facilities ride the same fiber path, and sometimes the same bundle.


I have to disagree...

About two years ago, maybe less, Sprint was doing some maintenance in California and was moving stuff through an alternate path in Arizona. However, while the CA path was off, someone took a backhoe to the AZ path. Neither the planned outage, the cut, nor myself were in the same state (I'm in Nevada). It didn't matter how many circuits I had with Sprint, because none of them worked, including my Sprint cell phone. However, I was still on the air because my other providers were unaffected.

Locally, yeah, the path in the ground are probably the same. But beyond that, it can matter, and I strongly recommend multihoming if the story above is something their organization would like to be protected from.

~Seth