Customer AS

Tue Aug 20 01:44:54 UTC 1996

Randy Bush writes:
> > In my (rather extensive) practice, multihoming by itself is
> > usually a major source of connectivity problems.
> 
> in my meager and bottom-feeding scum-sucking practice, multi-homing
> decreased unreliability delivered to our customers by a factor of ten
> or more.

Same with my customers, usually.

> > It is _much_ better to multihome to the same provider who then
> > can take care of messy global routing.
> 
> just what i always wanted, two connections to a broken provider.  you
> must be kidding.

No, frighteningly they are not kidding.

I tend to find people recommending not multihoming or getting multiple
connections to one provider typically work for a provider and have a
serious case of head swelling.

My customers who want to make sure that their net connections are
almost always up multihome, and are almost always happy for it,
because there is no alternative.

Equipment breaks, people fumble while typing into their Ciscos, and
backhoe fade cuts off entire POPs. The internet has this wonderful
technology associated with it that lets you route around breaks, but
it doesn't work if you don't have a second path to follow. I'm unaware
of the provider that has not had a meltdown of one sort or another at
at least once in the last couple of years. Shit happens. Thats why
customers multihome.

In the telephony industry, a usual standard to hold a section of the
network to is two minutes of downtime per year. I'll stop having my
customers multihome when most providers are operating up to that
spec.

Perry