[BBLISA] need a BGP tunnel peer (was Re: comcast ... again)

[Robert Keyes]

On Mon, 1 Nov 2010, Dean Anderson wrote:

> Tunneling to another ISP isn't going to be very efficient.  You are down
> if they are down, or if anything in between you and them is down; then
> you have ordinary problems if anything in between them and the client is
> down. (that was severe enough to motivate the search for multihoming)

For mission-critical applications you are correct, but other than that, 
current reliability seems sufficient. Of course, this may vary with the 
broadband provider, and the specific physical location of the broadband 
endpoint.

> BGP flapping can make things worse on both connections.

BGP can be configured so this is minimized.

> Why not just get a /24 from VZ and dual home your DNS, mail, etc servers
> to different IP addresses?  Seems easier.

I don't know how much Verizon would charge for this, even if it were 
available. Secondary DNS & SMTP servers are something I would assume is 
already in use.

So, this IP over IP isn't the solution for every problem, but it does have 
applications. For instance, someone running a mini- WISP off of their 
cable modem and some wifi APs. They'd want to hide the fact they're using 
comcast or whatever as their upstream, and provide routable IPs to their 
users. Wifi isn't suitable for mission-critical applications in the first 
place, so the addition of the VPN doesn't degrade the reliability value 
much. It does add latency, however, so perhaps VoIP wouldn't work so well.

The use of the VPN/cable modem as a backup in case the primary network 
connection fails does make sense. More latency is certainly better than 
no service.

-Bob