RE: Speeds and feeds

["Andrew J. Luca" <andrewluca () mediaone net>]

Thomas,

Ah, I didn't catch the "two routers" bit. Yes, with two routers, you won't
have balanced traffic --- unless you address the problem with a routing
protocol. I would question why you would implement traffic balancing over
two DS1s with two routers; a decent router that isn't doing naything but
pushing packets is going to be one of the more reliable things on the
network, and if you need fail-over, just keep a spare.
Keeping the second router as a spare is pretty expensive.  Especially if you
want more than a DS-1 worth of bandwidth - which was the original point of
the post, I think.  Anyway, an internal routing protocol (other than
something like iBGP) isn't going to work in this instance.

You'd need to have an agreement with your upstream to balance inbound
traffic over the two lines; running an IGP between your end and the ISP
should solve this.
You'd need to have an agreement with the whole internet!  A provider isn't
going to run BGP with you unless you have multiple connections.  From my
experience, it is near impossible to get any of the larger providers to run
something like OSPF with you either.  This discussion isn't relevant unless
we are considering the case of an interdomain routing protocol such as BGP.
If we are considering the case of an IGP with a single provider, there would
be a limited win from multiple DS-1 connections IMHO.  In that case, I would
suggest that they would want to look at the original suggestion of a larger
pipe - i.e. limited bandwidth DS-3.

Just my opinion.
Drew