Thus spake "Peter Francis" <peter@softaware.com>
Any business needs: 1. to be able to change upstream providers without having to renumber.
Why? Intelligent use of DNS and dhcp make renumbering only a minor inconvenience.
Renumbering PCs is a trivial task. Reconfiguring hundreds (or thousands) of routers, firewalls, etc. to account for the moved PCs is not trivial. Renumbering servers is not trivial.
2. to be able to change access providers without having to suffer multi-month down-times.
Mission/business critical services should be in a co-lo anyway and not off a DSL line.
Keep in mind that Fortune 100 companies with multiple DS3s in several US locations are in the same boat wrt renumbering. Most don't qualify for portable addresses by ARIN's rules. Also, try convincing someone like AmEx or Citibank that they should put their servers under someone else's physical control -- that'll be good for a laugh. Sure, that's extreme, but where exactly do you draw the line on who's "important" enough to host their own servers?
3. to be able to have its net-block(s) visible regardless of which ISPs they are currently using.
How do you propose doing this without growing the routing table 1-2 orders of magnitude?
If they're only announcing one or two routes (reasonable if RIR policy were more sane), it would *decrease* the routing tables by an order of magnitude.
Currently the only ones that can do that are those that; 1. Are large enough to justify a /20 (begging the question of how they got that large). 2. Can afford their own datacenter.
It looks like our technical solutions are raising unreasonable barriers to entry for small businesses.
No. Co-lo your website and "intranet". Get two T1's that same provider via two different entry points/carriers to your office (if possible) and you should be about as rock solid you could expect for $2-3000/month or there abouts.
Trust all of your server availability and corporate connectivity to a single ISP? The only point of failure you've (hopefully) eliminated is the local loop. And, if you depend on back-end servers to feed your coloed web servers (likely), that local loop is still essential. And now you're paying for rack space and it's a pain to do maintenance. Wonderful.
Peter
S