routing around Sprint's depeering damage

Sun Nov 2 15:34:46 UTC 2008

Matthew Kaufman wrote:
> James Jun wrote:
>> As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I 
>> also have
>> no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either
>> networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have
>> customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are 
>> just as
>> negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. ...
> 
> Ah yes, I suspect we can get all the network operators here to agree 
> that any customer of another ISP should buy a second connection "just in 
> case". Maybe this breakage will turn out to be the best way for everyone 
> to double their customer base overnight.

I have a probably dumb question. Even if a company were of large enough
wallet to have, say, a single redundant connection, how could it
evaluate the partition problem in order to choose the "best" connection
(where "best" is a function of overall connectivity, say) ? It seems to
me that that's a really, really hard problem. And surely isn't a static
one-off kind of calculation, right?

		Mike