Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 15:06:21 -0400
From: John Stracke <francis(_at_)ecal(_dot_)com>
> it's not at all clear to me why households need traditional multihoming,
> nor how to make it feasible for households to have it. so I would regard
> this as overdesign of the home 'internet interface box'
Now that I've got a decent DSL provider, I've found that the least
reliable component of my Net access is the power line: my DSL just
works, but the power company has been flaking out 2-3 times a week
for the past month or so. (I have my computers on UPSes, but your
average K-Mart Box user wouldn't.) Multihoming wouldn't solve that.
It depends on your ISP. In the worst case some consumer grade DSL lines
are pretty bad --- 2-3 hour outages in the middle of the day (after all
no one uses the Internet during the day --- they're at work! :-),
sometimes every 3-4 days. (I don't use this provider any more; clearly
they're using all of their money to take out full-page and half-page ads
in the Boston Globe's, and they're not spending it on upgrading their
network operations. :-)
To make matters worse, there's a huge price differential between
"consumer grade" ISP's and "business grade" ISP's. This kind of
situation is just ripe for arbitradge. :-)
I can imagine some poor (but demanding) network geeks deciding that
they'll solve this problem by purchasing multiple cheap consumer grade
ISP's (say a cable modem and a ADSL line), and then set up tunnels to
some place where they can get address space. If you can assume that
only one of your consomer grade pipes will crap out at a time, they can
switch the tunnel endpoint to the other grade of service, and keep
working with the same IP addresses, even though one of their lines has
stopped working. (This is also useful because the cheap consumer grade
ISP's generally won't give you a large address block, even without the
dual redundancy --- and two cheap consumer grade network services is
probably far cheaper than a single business grade ISP monthly fee.)
Right now, getting address space via tunnelling usually requires knowing
someone with connections at some institution with a fast connection to
the internet and a large amount of available address space. But I
suspect there may be a huge business opportunity here, especially if the
the some price differential between various grades of service continues.
- Ted