Re: BBN outage

[Per Gregers Bilse <bilse () EU net>]

> > Why, just a few weeks ago there was a big discussion here on the
> > NANOG list that definitively proved that end-user multihoming
> > REDUCED reliability for that customer. BBN is a big company...
> > why would you want to risk all the complexity of having a 
> > backup circuit to someone else?
>
> Because loss of connectivity for a day costs 10's of thousands
> of dollars and, evidently, even the "big" companies are not
> immune from "acts of god" like what happened today.

Please distinguish between singly-connected and singly-homed, they
really are two different things.  If Sun has just a plain, regular
connection, a garden variety leased line outage will take them out.
If OTOH they had had a connection to one of BBN's other CA POPs, they
would have been just fine.  It is intuitively obvious that the
advantage of multihoming does not outweigh the additional complexity,
cost and failure modes, whereas multiconnecting can be done at
reasonable cost while actually providing more reliable service
overall.  All information clearly indicates that the PA outage was
one of these near-enough disasters that can and do happen, just like
hurricanes and floods and whatever.  You can't blame BBN for that,
but you could conceivably blame Sun, InfoWorld and/or whoever for
having just a single connection, if they're supposed to take their
Internet business seriously -- do these people really want to be
taken out by a blown CSU/DSU?

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