John Neiberger wrote:

Thanks to everyone who has responded so far. I'm glad that I got some opinions here before I proceeded. I also participate in another list that has some fairly experienced people on it. They prevailing opinion there was that multihoming to multiple providers was overrated and largely unnecessary, and they just about had me convinced.

My current opinion is that since we can't accept much downtime in the case of a single provider failure, it's probably not wise to put all of our eggs in Sprint's basket even if all circuits are geographically diverse.

This decision should be a business decision. Business decisions are made for a number of reasons. There is no message in the order I list the ones that come quickly to mind, I personally think some of them are faulty, but all are real. Engineered designs. Political needs. Personal prejudices. Posturing. Appearances. I personally favor the engineering approach, which if properly done will account for the meaningful parts of the others. A recent employer had a very low cost plan that had for practical purposes unlimited capacity available which were required to throttle to reduce commodity Internet expenses. New management decided multi- homing was necessary at relatively huge expense for reasons that must have made sense to somebody. -- Requiescas in pace o email

JN> Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 10:10:17 -0700 JN> From: John Neiberger JN> My current opinion is that since we can't accept much JN> downtime in the case of a single provider failure, it's JN> probably not wise to put all of our eggs in Sprint's basket JN> even if all circuits are geographically diverse. Use multiple border routers. Keep your IGP lean and nimble. Think about BGP/IGP synchronization. WAN links can fail, but so can ethernet links and entire routers. Eddy -- EverQuick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita _________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses : blacklist@brics.com -or- alfra@intc.net -or- curbjmp@intc.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked.