[arin-ppml] Rationale for /22

[William Herrin]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 2:01 PM, David Farmer<farmer at umn.edu> wrote:
> Thinking a little out side the box here and I'm not even sure
> something like this would be legal, it might be considered
> colluding.  What if a pair of providers or maybe even a set of
> providers were to jointly obtain a block of addresses to allow
> customers to multihome.  Customers would connect to two or
> more participating providers, announce there block to the
> providers and then the providers contain the customer
> announcements within there joint infrastructure and only
> announce the aggeraget to the Internet.
>
> As I don't work for an ISP, I'm not sure this could work from a
> business model point of view either.  It would definitely take a
> set of ISP with an enlightened view of competition to make it
> work.
>
> Could something like this work?

Hi David,

Yes and no.

Malfunctions inside or between the ISPs announcing the aggregate could
break it for all of downstream users. Suck the packets into the
malfunctioning ISP and drop them on the floor. However, as a "poor
man's multihoming" it could provide a platform for solving the more
common "oops my T1 is down" problem without having to announce the
route world-wide.

But the telling factor is this: ISPs don't do it now. Nothing prevents
two or several ISPs from doing a joint venture and having the JV
request addresses from ARIN for precisely this sort of scenario. But
they don't because of the complexity and because folks who want
multihoming and can afford to do BGP at all tend to want real
multihoming rather than a stripped down version.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
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