Are you saying that the house.gov site is not in a large data center with direct fiber connectivity along with many of the other large federal web sites (with alternative hot sites ready to go at a moment's notice, of course)? As someone who has been to different government data centers, I can tell you they have huge amounts of data connectivity there in case of emergency. For a large site like house.gov, bandwidth should never be an issue. In this case I highly doubt it was the issue, but instead overloading of the hardware in place. Just my $.02... Mick -----Original Message----- From: Joseph S D Yao [mailto:jsdy@center.osis.gov] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 11:54 AM To: Ernie Rubi Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: 143.228.0.0/16 and house.gov What makes you thing that .gov's "have" anything at all? They have to buy any bandwidth they have (other than strictly internal bandwidth) from ISP's. If the IT budget doesn't allow for it, the IT department can't buy it. If the projected need is much lower than this surge, then they would not have budgeted for it. The USGOV, contrary to some folks' belief, does not own the Internet. Some ISP's are able to quickly add bandwidth if the line is set up for it, but I think the IT department would have had to have an existing active relationship with the ISP to be able to know whom to ask. -- Joe Yao Qinetiq NA / Analex Contractor