On Tue, 21 Aug 2007, Sean Donelan wrote:
I don't think the target customer in this case is really in the market for properly physically diverse paths which provide partial 1:1. The target customer seems to be looking for no-frills, cheap Internet.
Customers in a market for properly physically diverse paths with partial 1:1 probably are already buying Internet from other ISPs.
I was thinking more for Cogent's backbone itself - I fully agree that customers who need uptime need to multi-home and do their path route homework. If a piece of fiber between two POPs on a given backbone fails and there isn't a redundant path (i.e. both sides of a 'redundant' ring ride through the same conduit or on different sides of the same railroad track) and/or the L2/L3 infrastructure isn't robust enough to tolerate such a failure without dropping customer traffic into the bit bucket, then that's definitely a design/operations problem. While customers can't directly influence those decisions, they can either 1) multi-home to different carriers, or 2) vote with their wallets and take their business elsewhere. jms