multi-homing

["Dana Hudes" <dhudes () panix com>]

The pressure is on to use co-location service only from Big Players. Indeed, remember the big fight
over Exodus peering arrangements? Someone (GTE?) decided that Exodus should pay them for transit
and pulled peering. since no other large network pulled such stunt the result was  that GTE customers
were inconvenienced more than Exodus customers. 
The message is loud and clear. If you want your server farm to have good access, put it in a good co-location
facility in the US run by (or connect your co-located equipment to) a very large provider who has good redundancy not 
only of their network as a whole but of their colo facility (a co-lo facility with only one WAN circuit does not have 
good redundancy even if the LAN is exceedingly good and fault-tolerant etc.).

Outside the US, the filtering of long prefixes doesn't seem to be as much of a problem -- but nobody wants to see an 
announcement from their peer of a  /16 broken into individual /24  all with the same next hop.
Even when router memory and CPU capacity are not near limits, it is annoying.

(sorry that the previous version went out in MIME format, I had replied to someone else's MIME formatted message).



 
Dana