From: Scott Huddle <huddle@mci.net> Probably the best thing that be currently supported is getting two diverse connections to a single provider that can globally aggregate your network. The connections should go to different POPs and should follow seperate physical paths. This should provide you the desired reliability and load sharing. This solution has been pointed out before. Also, Dorian Kim sent in a good message to the Big-Internet list talking about reliability (the stated goal of most multi-homing), and the 7 places you could do redundancy, and what was really important in achieving reliability, which contained a lot of good insight. Here's his message (appended). Noel -------- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 1995 03:57:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Dorian Rysling Kim <dorian@cic.net> To: ... big-internet@munnari.oz.au Subject: Re: Multihoming .... There are many places where redundancy can be achieved with multiple connections. 0) Equipment spares on site 1) Diverse local access of the two links 2) Diverse routing of the physical links into COs 3) Diverse routing to different local providers 4) Diverse routing to different regional providers 5) Diverse routing to different large transit providers (MCI, Sprint, ANS, Alternet, Eunet etc) 6) #5 + connection to the NAPs. All of the above give you redundancy at various single points of failures. In my experince, #0 - #2 should be considered as important in providing true redundancy as 4-6. In fact, in most cases, the most common case of outtages come from equipment failures, and circuits themselves, and sites who are looking for multihoming for the reason of redundancy should look at the cost of having 0-2, and think long and hard about whether multihoming is what they really need. -dorian