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Why, just a few weeks ago there was a big discussion here on the NANOG list that definitively proved that end-user multihoming REDUCED reliability for that customer. BBN is a big company... why would you want to risk all the complexity of having a backup circuit to someone else?

Because loss of connectivity for a day costs 10's of thousands of dollars and, evidently, even the "big" companies are not immune from "acts of god" like what happened today.

Please distinguish between singly-connected and singly-homed, they really are two different things. If Sun has just a plain, regular connection, a garden variety leased line outage will take them out. If OTOH they had had a connection to one of BBN's other CA POPs, they would have been just fine. It is intuitively obvious that the advantage of multihoming does not outweigh the additional complexity, cost and failure modes, whereas multiconnecting can be done at reasonable cost while actually providing more reliable service overall. All information clearly indicates that the PA outage was one of these near-enough disasters that can and do happen, just like hurricanes and floods and whatever. You can't blame BBN for that, but you could conceivably blame Sun, InfoWorld and/or whoever for having just a single connection, if they're supposed to take their Internet business seriously -- do these people really want to be taken out by a blown CSU/DSU? -- ------ ___ --- Per G. Bilse, Mgr Network Operations ----- / / / __ ___ _/_ ---- EUnet Communications Services B.V. ---- /--- / / / / /__/ / ----- Singel 540, 1017 AZ Amsterdam, NL --- /___ /__/ / / /__ / ------ tel: +31 20 5305333, fax: +31 20 6224657 --- ------- 24hr emergency number: +31 20 421 0865 --- Connecting Europe since AS286 --- http://www.EU.net e-mail: bilse@EU.net