Shared network services and transit providers

Sun Aug 15 01:02:51 UTC 1999

Shared registries and backup, note: this is not intended to be NSI bashing.

Although NSI receives free transit from a number of backbone's, it appears
NSI is only announcing its own registry via the free transit it receives.
The shared registry whois.crsnic.net appeared to be single-homed through
Sprint today.  This came up, because there was a network problem reaching
whois.crsnic.net, but it didn't affect NSI's own service.

I also looked at several of the other well-known registries.  From my
network vantage point (BGP only shows the 'best' transit):  ARIN seems
to have at least two ISP connections, RIPE at least three connections.
APNIC appears single-homed through Telstra, I guess shouldn't be
surprising since its in Australia.

Are these shared services important enough for network operators to try
to coordinate multiple connections for them?  Or with competition coming,
let them each do whatever they want?
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation