On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, David Hares wrote:
True enough. But you don't really need multiple POPs in a city. Frame Relay and ATM are both distance insensative, pricewise. Most, if not all, of the serious players have discounts off list from various providers so it's reasonable to provision one or more circuits well out of the local area. Deals can usually be worked for dedicated facilites too.
Hmm...we usually get hit with extra charges for crossing lata boundaries. I wouldn't say Frame is entirely distance insensative. Besides, even if a little guy in Gainesville, FL does get Frame to say UUNet in Miami and Jacksonville, this'll take care of when one of your circuits goes out and UUNet or Bell can't figure out what happened for 12 hours, but it totally ignores the fact that at times (often for extended times) peering connections between various Tier-1's suck. I remember at least one time for several weeks when crossing between UUNet and Sprint meant >1000ms response times. Redundancy is only one reason to multihome. More paths (hopefully at least one per destination that doesn't suck) is another big one, and you're not going to get this benefit from adding N circuits to one "big clued-in provider"...though you might get it from a medium sized regional provider that buys transit and doesn't have overloaded peering connections. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route System Administrator | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________