[NANOG] Multihoming for small frys?

Wed May 21 21:51:54 UTC 2008

Seth Mattinen wrote:

> About two years ago, maybe less, Sprint was doing some maintenance in 
> California and was moving stuff through an alternate path in Arizona. 
> However, while the CA path was off, someone took a backhoe to the AZ 
> path. Neither the planned outage, the cut, nor myself were in the same 
> state (I'm in Nevada). It didn't matter how many circuits I had with 
> Sprint, because none of them worked, including my Sprint cell phone. 
> However, I was still on the air because my other providers were unaffected.

I've been in a situation before where circuits with two different 
providers were both taken out by the same fiber cut.  These were large 
long-haul circuits.

I've had another situation where two circuits out of Charlotte, NC ended 
up in the same bundle in Virginia, even though they were one was going 
to Atlanta, and another was headed to DC, through two different 
providers.  One provider bought the bundle from someone, and leased part 
of it to another company, who sublet it to another company, that 
provided service to the the carrier that provided us the service. 
Kicker was that I think it was originally our fiber.

Of course, these are circuits, not internet traffic.  With todays' large 
networks, it's really hard to completely isolate any given city.  Oh 
sure, it can happen, and some cities are unpopular, and don't hardly 
qualify for IP service, so diversity is hard to justify, but most cities 
have at least two, if not three or more paths out.

  -Sean