Hi, Paul Ferguson wrote:

I would submit that applications are quite reliant upon routing for transit capabilities, so I'm not quite sure what your point is here.

What I meant was using applications to "multihome", instead of routers. Let's say you have an ISP with two upstream providers. Instead of getting PI space, you allocate space from their networks. Run a WWW proxy caching system which can either default to one provider, or alternate between the two (in an attempt to load balance). If one provider goes down, let your cache switch to the other one. In the case of inbound e-mail, you can (try to) load balance MX records. For outbound e-mail, let your server choose one of the two upstream paths. Of course, this won't work with apps that rely on a direct connection between the end-user's dialup link, and the server on the other end. But, in high-cost low-bandwidth situations like ours, these are discouraged anyway. -- miguel a.l. paraz <map@iphil.net> http://www.iphil.net/~map/ PGP: 0x43F0D011 iphil communications: isp/intranet design and implementation, makati city, ph