Does anyone multihome anymore?

Wed Aug 22 20:32:55 UTC 2007

At 03:26 PM 8/22/2007, Steve Gibbard wrote:

>Thought about that way, there's nothing "Draconian" about turning 
>off a connection (or a switch, or a router, or any other redundant 
>component) that's not doing what you want it to.

While I agree in general with what you are getting at, one point to 
add is cost.  All these goals are constrained within a business case 
to make.  In my case, I could turn off my Cogent connection, but I 
would have ended up punishing connectivity to other networks that are 
off Cogent in Toronto only.  This would have forced them to get to me 
via Cogent's pop in Chicago, which was overloaded.  So to fix my 
connectivity into AS577, I would have to hose another group of users 
in Toronto.  Now I could of course add more diversity by adding 
another connection in Toronto.  But, I have to justify the business 
case to do that.  Is it worth the extra money for the few times this 
particular type of outage happens ?  In my case probably not. The 
cost to privately peer with 577 is quite high and there are no good 
transit providers at 151 Front that have good connectivity to Bell 
other than via Chicago.

>   Instead, you're taking advantage of a main feature of your 
> design.  If your other providers are doing 95th percentile billing, 
> you even have a day and a half per month that you can leave a 
> connection down at no financial cost.  The alternative, as you seem 
> to have noticed, is to spend your day stressing out about your 
> network not working properly, and complaining about being 
> helpless.  You don't need redundancy for that.

I didnt mean to sound complaintive.  My original post to NANOG was 
more of trying to get details as to what was going on beyond the 
rather basic info 1st level support and the cogent status page was 
saying.  After the original post, various questions / comments came 
up as to what could and could not be done in this situation.

         ---Mike 