No, but it depends on the capacity requirements. We looked into self-homed vs. colo. Given that; 1) Most eCommerce projects need to be completed inside of six months. 2) Connectivity needs to happen in the first 3 weeks of project kick-off. 3) Telco WAN circuit delivery, for large capacity, takes anywhere from 6 to 18 weeks per circuit (depending on RBOC ... could be MUCH longer). 4) Facility build-out takes even longer (3 to 6 months). For large capacity sites, colo is the only way, with potential self-homing within two years. It just can't happen faster than that. Also, smaller providers are out, because of public peering point congestion and that is usually their only avenue. Large providers, with their own private dark-fiber network, leaving only last-mile traffic to the public Internet, appears to be the only way to go <sigh>.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Alex Rubenstein Sent: Sunday, December 05, 1999 9:54 AM To: Dana Hudes Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: multi-homing
On Sun, 5 Dec 1999, Dana Hudes wrote:
The pressure is on to use co-location service only from Big Players. Indeed, remember the big fight over Exodus peering arrangements? Someone (GTE?) decided that Exodus should pay them for transit and pulled peering. since no other large network pulled such stunt the result was that GTE customers were inconvenienced more than Exodus customers. The message is loud and clear. If you want your server farm to have good access, put it in a good co-location
facility in the
US run by (or connect your co-located equipment to) a very large provider who has good redundancy not only of their network as a whole but of their colo facility (a co-lo facility with only one WAN circuit does not have good redundancy even if the LAN is exceedingly good and fault-tolerant etc.).
I'd disagree whole-heartedly (partly because I am not a huge, national tier-1).
Wouldn't you rather connect your equipment to a smaller company, that is potentially more flexible, has more clueful people, has better pricing, and is multihomed to maybe 3 or 6 or 9 backbones?