Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

Tue Apr 3 17:55:56 UTC 2001

> From: Travis Pugh [mailto:tpugh at shore.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 10:34 AM

> I'm at a multi-POP network in Boston.  We've had great luck selling
> customers a Verizon circuit into one of our POPs and a 
> Worldcom circuit
> into a different one.  It costs more, but they don't have nearly the
> exposure of a single circuit customer.  However, if you're 
> not set up to
> do this, the appropriate level of paranoia calls for circuits to two
> different providers.  Maybe if SPs really addressed availability
> requirements of their customers, it wouldn't be such an issue.

The problem with this, if done, is that we back right into the other problem
of prefix filtering. If the customer has a /19 or /20, there is generally no
problem. But, if it is the usual case (/24) then only one of the upstreams
can aggragate the routes up. What is the other ISP to do? How would this be
made to work? BTW, this is exactly the reason we weren't fully multi-homed
yet.

Yes, greg described a way where both interfaces (end point) were NAT'd.
However, I have a concern with brittleness and tinker-factor there.