Is multihoming hard? [was: DNS amplification]

Thu Mar 21 04:44:32 UTC 2013

On Mar 20, 2013, at 8:11 PM, John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:

> On Mar 20, 2013, at 2:25 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I don't want the residential customers themselves running BGP at all. However, if there were motivation on the provider side, automated BGP configuration could enable consumers to attach to multiple providers and actually reduce support calls significantly.
> 
> Okay, I'll agree, but "if there were motivation" is a very large "if"...
> 
> The only motivation would be money, as represented by customers leaving 
> to competitors as a result of a service provider not offering your proposed 
> service bundle.  
> 
> If you can figure out a way to persuade service providers of this belief,
> I would ask that you also persuade them that they have to offer dual-stack 
> for all of their customers (which may have already resulted in them losing 
> a small number of customers who expected IPv6 by now... :-)

You, of all people, John, are very aware of my efforts on this basis.

I agree it's a very large if. In fact, the very real probability that dissatisfied customers will
use their ability to multi home and run BGP as a reduction of the pain point of changing
subscribers is probably the largest reason that it is not available. The providers have
exact opposite motivation. This is a fine example of how the efficiency of the invisible
hand fails when it comes to technical products where the masses fail to actually
realize that they are being shafted and artificially constrained by the limitations placed
on them by their vendors.

However, that's getting a bit far afield for NANOG, so I tried to stick to the technical
aspects of the argument.

Owen