multi-homing fixed

Tue Aug 28 15:56:06 UTC 2001

| I've asked this of a number of people now, but how many providers
| have multiple POP's in a city that are _completely redundant_?
| That is, they can operate _fully_ with one POP out of service?

The suitcase nuclear bomb that takes out my facility in one location
is very likely to take out my other facility in the same metro area.
And probably all the customers who would remotely care.

| Even if they have two pops, many of those cities won't have redundant
| long haul capacity.  

The bigger problem is actually that many of those cities will have zero
customers who are willing to pay extra to be connected to a router
in POP-A and a router in POP-B, and I know of no way to make such
a connection cost the same or less than a single connection to only
one of those routers.   So, while it's _possible_ to make the Big Red Switches'
states very nearly totally invisible to any customer, it's not often done.

But, hey, deep-pockets people have found out that several suppliers
are eminently capable of engineering (nearly) all the resilience and
redundundancy that the deep-pockets can manage to pay for...

	Sean.