Randy Bush writes:
In my (rather extensive) practice, multihoming by itself is usually a major source of connectivity problems.
in my meager and bottom-feeding scum-sucking practice, multi-homing decreased unreliability delivered to our customers by a factor of ten or more.
Same with my customers, usually.
It is _much_ better to multihome to the same provider who then can take care of messy global routing.
just what i always wanted, two connections to a broken provider. you must be kidding.
No, frighteningly they are not kidding. I tend to find people recommending not multihoming or getting multiple connections to one provider typically work for a provider and have a serious case of head swelling. My customers who want to make sure that their net connections are almost always up multihome, and are almost always happy for it, because there is no alternative. Equipment breaks, people fumble while typing into their Ciscos, and backhoe fade cuts off entire POPs. The internet has this wonderful technology associated with it that lets you route around breaks, but it doesn't work if you don't have a second path to follow. I'm unaware of the provider that has not had a meltdown of one sort or another at at least once in the last couple of years. Shit happens. Thats why customers multihome. In the telephony industry, a usual standard to hold a section of the network to is two minutes of downtime per year. I'll stop having my customers multihome when most providers are operating up to that spec. Perry