"The Unreliable Internet" and multihoming (posted 2001-09-28)

Geoff Huston has written an article "The Unreliable Internet" (PDF) about how ISP networks becoming less resilient and customers becoming more so (by connecting to two or more ISPs, in other words: multihoming) creates a vicious circle.

At the same time, there is concern about the growth of the number of networks in the global routing table, which is in part caused by the increase in multihoming. The IETF Operations and Management Area has the multi6 working group looking into the the issue from an IPv6 angle. While there is much improvement possible in current protocols, there is no be-all, end-all solution in sight that would scale to unlimited numbers of multihomers.