[NANOG] Multihoming for small frys?

Wed May 21 20:40:50 UTC 2008

Sean Figgins wrote:
> 
> Now, I have a question about this...  Is the customer using the sites 
> for redundancy, and will have both upstream providers in each site?
> 
> Honestly, a small operation like this may be better served by multiple 
> connections to the same provider.  Such a setup can usually be done to 
> multiple routers, through redundant circuit paths, and done at 
> substantially less cost that two different providers.  And, in my 
> experience, using one provider can often be more reliable than multiple 
> providers, given how many providers transport facilities ride the same 
> fiber path, and sometimes the same bundle.

I have to disagree...

About two years ago, maybe less, Sprint was doing some maintenance in 
California and was moving stuff through an alternate path in Arizona. 
However, while the CA path was off, someone took a backhoe to the AZ 
path. Neither the planned outage, the cut, nor myself were in the same 
state (I'm in Nevada). It didn't matter how many circuits I had with 
Sprint, because none of them worked, including my Sprint cell phone. 
However, I was still on the air because my other providers were unaffected.

Locally, yeah, the path in the ground are probably the same. But beyond 
that, it can matter, and I strongly recommend multihoming if the story 
above is something their organization would like to be protected from.

~Seth