Re: wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper seeking advice on building a nationwide network

[Jon Lewis <jlewis () lewis org>]

Dorn, you have some interesting mail habits.  Your message was sent 
directly to me (without list).  My reply to that message was to you 
(without the list).  Now you're replying to that reply and including the 
list again.  That's generally frowned upon, but in this particular case, 
no harm done.

More inline....

On Tue, 20 Sep 2011, Dorn Hetzel wrote:

> >  How about a hard T1 to provider A and a GRE tunnel over a 3G router for a
> > > backup?  That's certainly physically diverse...
> >
> > If I was the ARIN auditor, I'd say that's borderline acceptable as
> > multihomed.  It's not much different from one of your connections being
> > "wireless", as long as that 3G connection is of sufficient bandwidth to of
> > meaningful utility if the T1 is down.  If your primary connection is
> > T1/T3/ethernet/etc. and your second is a v.90 modem, then I'd probably call
> > BS on the claim of being multihomed.
> So now you think ARIN should be judging how much bandwidth is enough, and
> how much is not?

To a certain degree, yes.  If your normal traffic level is several hundred 
mbit/s for instance, and you're doing that with one provider via gigabit 
ethernet, then a 3g wireless connection and GRE tunnel to a second 
AS is not multihoming.

If you open the door to that sort of interpretation, then every org with a 
T1 and a backup dial-up connection can claim to be "multihomed".

In either of these cases, it's not enough to just have the connection. 
The ARIN NRPM definition of Multihomed includes "has one or more routing 
prefixes announced by at least two of its upstream ISPs."  Are you really 
going to announce your prefix[es] to both your real provider _and_ your 
ridiculously low bandwidth provider?  Even if you prepend the latter 
considerably, you're likely to receive some traffic via that path.

> It's a slippery slope from "v.90 not good enough" to "less than 2xOCn not
> good enough" where n can be adjusted to suitably limit competition...

Perhaps the manual should be updated to replace "full-time connectivity" 
with something a bit more fleshed out specifying that the full-time 
connectivity be via dedicated circuit [frame-relay permanent virtual 
circuits included, if you can still find a LEC willing to sell them] or 
PTP wireless.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
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