Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

Mon Jan 29 19:02:24 UTC 1996

On Mon, 29 Jan 1996, Dick St.Peters wrote:

> Unfortunately, *their* major customer had its weekend trade show a
> week ago when a big fiber cut isolated the show from my customer's
> server all day.  Since the company had gone public the Thursday before
> and had bet its farm (and a lot of other peoples') on good press from
> the trade show, things were kind of tense, and my customer is in no
> mood to be told how they're already multi-homed.

In fact, multi-homing is entirely irrelevant here from a technical point 
of view. From a business point of view "multi-homing" may have some 
value, but technically it is worthless, *UNLESS* it provides topological 
diversity. Of course that's what everyone *EXPECTS* to get from 
multihoming but not that many people closely examine it from an 
engineering point of view to see if they are really getting what they expect.

It starts at home. Are you going out two separate demarcs? Down two 
different streets? Through two different local exchange buildings?
And then on the regional level, are both your providers renting bandwidth 
on the same inter-city fibre bundle?

Seems to me that all of this physical topology nitty-gritty needs to be 
dealt with openly, at least with ISP customers, and it seems to me that 
it is relevant to any Quality-Of-Service metrics that IETF WG's look at.
Remember, TCP/IP networks were *INTENDED* to be able to continue 
operations in the event of a war. The software is certainly capable of 
this but the physical topology leaves something to be desired.

Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: michael at memra.com