Dorn, you have some interesting mail habits. Your message was sent directly to me (without list). My reply to that message was to you (without the list). Now you're replying to that reply and including the list again. That's generally frowned upon, but in this particular case, no harm done. More inline.... On Tue, 20 Sep 2011, Dorn Hetzel wrote:
How about a hard T1 to provider A and a GRE tunnel over a 3G router for a
backup? That's certainly physically diverse...
If I was the ARIN auditor, I'd say that's borderline acceptable as multihomed. It's not much different from one of your connections being "wireless", as long as that 3G connection is of sufficient bandwidth to of meaningful utility if the T1 is down. If your primary connection is T1/T3/ethernet/etc. and your second is a v.90 modem, then I'd probably call BS on the claim of being multihomed.
So now you think ARIN should be judging how much bandwidth is enough, and how much is not?
To a certain degree, yes. If your normal traffic level is several hundred mbit/s for instance, and you're doing that with one provider via gigabit ethernet, then a 3g wireless connection and GRE tunnel to a second AS is not multihoming. If you open the door to that sort of interpretation, then every org with a T1 and a backup dial-up connection can claim to be "multihomed". In either of these cases, it's not enough to just have the connection. The ARIN NRPM definition of Multihomed includes "has one or more routing prefixes announced by at least two of its upstream ISPs." Are you really going to announce your prefix[es] to both your real provider _and_ your ridiculously low bandwidth provider? Even if you prepend the latter considerably, you're likely to receive some traffic via that path.
It's a slippery slope from "v.90 not good enough" to "less than 2xOCn not good enough" where n can be adjusted to suitably limit competition...
Perhaps the manual should be updated to replace "full-time connectivity" with something a bit more fleshed out specifying that the full-time connectivity be via dedicated circuit [frame-relay permanent virtual circuits included, if you can still find a LEC willing to sell them] or PTP wireless. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________