[BBLISA] Telecommunications Recommendations...

[David Allan]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2010, Bill Bogstad wrote:

>> I'm not an ISP guy, so someone else out there could probably give you
>> more insight on using BGP. It's not trivial to setup though.
>
> While the above is technically correct, in his circumstance BGP is not
> an option.   To do BGP you TYPICALLY need to
> own your IP address space in order to be able to advertise them
> successfully.  He's talking about how many addresses his provider is
> going to give him so he doesn't have such addresses.
>
> Second, the address space he's talking about is so small that even if
> he does get addresses and providers who will do BGP, no one else will
> pay attention to his advertisements anyway.   Each advertisement takes
> up expensive memory in core Internet routers and the larger network
> providers aren't going to spend lots of money so he can have redundant
> network providers.  Don't go there.

Agreed, and even if it were technically feasible, the economics of setting 
it up aren't likely to be there.  The ninja you'd need to hire to 
implement it will bankrupt you, and getting it wrong is very, very 
painful.

There was a very good suggestion earlier in the thread which was to 
colocate your resources that need reliable inbound connectivity at a 
provider that does proper redundancy and get cheaper connectivity for 
outbound office traffic, websurfing and the like.  I've used that 
strategy, and liked it.  You do have to figure out what your cost of 
downtime is in each case to calculate what you should pay for reliability 
for the colo and the office.

Dave