Non-ISP companies multi-homing?

Kent W. England kwe at geo.net
Thu Jul 24 16:22:12 UTC 1997


At 09:20 PM 7/23/97 -0400, John J. Buxbaum wrote:
> Bruce,
>I have several customer who are multi-homed, some of which are ISP"s but not
>all. I am seeing this a coming trend for customers who wish to have
>redundant internet access. A bit pricey i bet, but maybe easier on the
>nerves :)
>

Here in the Bay Area, the BBN outage of last fall, among other outages, has
really shaken up the established Silicon Valley companies. A lot of network
managers had a lot of explaining to do and many of them said "I recommended
a backup connection, but it wasn't in the budget." Now it's in the budget.
Every major corporate site will multi-home if they haven't already, or else
move their servers into an ISP POP.

I do not in any way mean to cast aspersions on BBN/BARRNET. I used to work
at BBN before it bought BARRNET. I also was Exec Dir of CERFNET, a BARRNET
competitor in soCal.

It is the fact that a 24 hour outage could happen to the premium Bay Area
ISP that was the shocker. If it can happen to BBN/BARRNET, in the view of
corporate network managers and their executive managements, then it can
happen to anyone and there is no way that a major site can afford to rely
on just one ISP. It's too bad it was BBN, but it would have happened
eventually to UUNET or MCI or Sprint.

Multihoming is here to stay in the Bay Area.

--Kent


Kent W. England                                       VP of Technology
GeoNet Communications, Inc.                       Direct: 415.596.6321
555 Twin Dolphin Drive                               Fax: 415.596.1701
Redwood City, CA  94065                          Company: 415.596.1700
http://www.geo.net                                 Email:  kwe at geo.net



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