Advice on dealing with Sprint

Mon Sep 30 13:50:34 UTC 1996

Wait a sec, I was under the impression that multihoming with sprint was only a 
problem if you used PA addresses from Sprint. If you have PI addressing, or 
your addressing is from (for example) MCI, you shouldn't see a problem. Was I 
missing something?

-D

Darrel Lewis 
Network Engineer
Thomson Electronic Information Resources
dlewis at teir.com

	wsimpson @ greendragon.com ("William Allen Simpson") 
09/30/96 04:57 PM
To: jon @ worf.netins.net (Jon Green) @ Internet
cc: nanog @ merit.edu @ Internet 
Subject: Re: Advice on dealing with Sprint

Coming back to an old topic from whence we diverged, my advice would be
_not_ to connect or multihome with Sprint unless they accept you as a
peer and share the cost.  Earlier, we have learned that Sprint doesn't
multihome properly, as it deliberately ignores paths to its own
"customers" seen from other ISPs even when its own lines are down.  You
learned that they have restrictive policies on routers.  And more
recently, we learned that Sprint has extremely restrictive policies on
peering (exchanging routes).

There really isn't much point to multihome with Sprint except to load
share directly to Sprint's customers.  You don't get any of the other
benefits of redundancy.  Why bother paying for the link and Sprint for
the privilege?

I can tell you, since my upstream provider switched a few weeks ago from
multihome with Sprint and MCI, to nap.net and MCI, we've had _much_
better service!  When nap.net has had problems, multihoming has actually
worked correctly....

And multihoming with MCI and AlterNet seems to work well together, too.

WSimpson at UMich.edu
    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32
BSimpson at MorningStar.com
    Key fingerprint =  2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3  59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2