LET'S JUST GO AROUND

[Paul Ferguson]

Folks,

I think one would have to be a bit more precise about what problem it
is that they are trying to solve, what 'redundancy' actually means.
Chances are, that if you have more than one circuit to an upstream
provider (whether a single provider or several), both of them come
into your customer premise on the same entrance facilities, or ride
the same piece of fiber to the local CO. If this is the case, the
only 'redundancy' one would obtain by multihoming to two different
providers would be pseudo _transit_safety_ if one of the upstream
provider networks melted down; the ability to route packets via a
different path if the transit were somehow munged on a particular
Layer 3 upstream path.

In any event, this is definitely *not* appropriate discussion for
this list; the IP registries do not control the ability of an
applicant to multihome, nor can they ensure that a particular
prefix will be routable on the global Internet.

Haven't we pretty much hashed this topic to death?

-  paul

At 12:01 PM 2/7/97 EST, Matt Magri wrote:

>
>I think if you have a quality multihomed regional provider operating
>in your area then that's an excellent choice for a first connection.
>A second connection to that provider (if you could touch their net in
>a different, sensible location, perhaps) would be nice for redundancy
>on what is likely to be your most reliable link to the net. OTOH, I,
>_personally_, wouldn't budget the money towards that until I had
>already established connections of my own to multiple providers. Of
>course, if your goal wasn't to become a regional provider yourself then
>you might make a different choice. If so, keep an eye on the regional
>you're connected to for signs that the quality is waning, etc. since
>your fortunes are strongly linked to how they run their net.
>