I've noticed it, too... in some ways demand is even greater than among small ISPs who have an inkling about how BGP works.
Is my estimation that for at least some broadband providers, per-household/per-customer BGP is a operational expense
There are parties who are taking this into consideration.
capital purchase of new equipment, completely out-to-lunch (in advance of an interesting new product launch in the next few days)?
Re the "high cost" of multihoming... perhaps now. Most "smaller places" can't afford to multihome given the current cost of two T1s (hard to get BGP over broadband) and a Cisco that holds 128M (even "smaller places" seem to concerned about brand recognition, and are often reluctant to run Zebra).
Without trying to start a flamewar, this is one of the places where NAT is exceptionally valuable. Setting up "redundant" connectivity for these users given a set of n consumer-grade, commodity connections (DSL, dialup, cable, etc) is rather trivial, and NAPT implementations have gotten robust enough to accomodate most of the common layer-ignorant protocols. This user doesn't want global route visibility, nor do they give a shit about filtering or allocation policies -- they want to be able to get to their pr0n when The Internet is broke. This `knowledgable' SOHO user is most likely already using NAT to get their office buddies online across the $40/mo DSL link -- likewise, the use of NAT for multihoming isn't introducing any new complications into their End-to-End Experience (tm). For inbound services, where address distribution and portability is of the most concern, SMTP is the most to worry about, and multiple equal-weight MX's (to each of the PA addresses) take care of the problem. For a business considering this, and interested in external services, if they haven't already signed up for the $20/mo Web Hosting account from the back pages of $PC_USER_RAG, convincing them to do so shouldn't be hard. Given these caveats, the one problem that consistently comes up is link-state inspection. For the low-end, people are using the ethernet - <DOCIS,ADSL,2-way Satellite> bridge they got with the connection. PPPoE makes this easier, as there's an interface on the router that will change state, but otherwise its a guessing game. This is where providers aren't even begining to play -- forget BGP peers to end-users, has anyone had any luck getting any of the consumer-grade 'broadband' providers to do so much as a RIPv1 default advertisment? Of course, while this does keep the global routing table free of non-aggregated micro-allocations, it does increase overall utilization. Cleaner solutions for effective multihoming in the future are certainly needed, but Multihoming For Dummies is quite obtainable today.
However, I've encountered [consulting] customers with multiple _dialup_ connections who want to know if they can just balance traffic across both. I think that the demand is there -- current products just don't allow it.
It might be pricey for that application, but their 1750 can do it just fine. The pre-packaged "Internet Router/Firewalls" flooding the market from Linksys/Netgear/etc haven't caught on yet, but its just a matter of time. ..kg.. <back to lurking>