Re: Market for diversity (was: Re: Cogent latency / congestion)

["Justin M. Streiner" <streiner () cluebyfour org>]

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007, Sean Donelan wrote:

> I don't think the target customer in this case is really in the market for 
> properly physically diverse paths which provide partial 1:1.  The
> target customer seems to be looking for no-frills, cheap Internet.
>
> Customers in a market for properly physically diverse paths with partial 1:1 
> probably are already buying Internet from other ISPs.

I was thinking more for Cogent's backbone itself - I fully agree that 
customers who need uptime need to multi-home and do their path route 
homework.  If a piece of fiber between two POPs on a given backbone fails 
and there isn't a redundant path (i.e. both sides of a 'redundant' ring 
ride through the same conduit or on different sides of the same railroad 
track) and/or the L2/L3 infrastructure isn't robust enough to tolerate 
such a failure without dropping customer traffic into the bit bucket, 
then that's definitely a design/operations problem.  While customers can't 
directly influence those decisions, they can either 1) multi-home to 
different carriers, or 2) vote with their wallets and take their business 
elsewhere.

jms