In article <hot.mailing-lists.nanog-m0v1zka-000NjOC@aero.branch.com>, Jon Zeeff <jon@branch.com> wrote:

ISPs should provide good prices on backups connections (ie, connections that almost never get any traffic).

And then when they do get traffic they'll be overloaded. Either overloaded because the backup provider has no way to budget for your needs, or because you and a hundred other people are using them for backup. Personally I wouldn't trust "backup" lines that I'm not using regularly. Who knows if they'll even be working when I need them. If there were an analysis of the dual-home pairings we might find that only a handful (say 8) of pairings have significant numbers of dual-homed customers. I.e. suppose that MCI/UUNET is the most common dualhoming pair, then a jointly allocated block could be divided amongst their dual-homed customers. Not perfect by far, but something worth considering. Dean