Sean Figgins wrote:
Now, I have a question about this... Is the customer using the sites
for redundancy, and will have both upstream providers in each site?
Honestly, a small operation like this may be better served by multiple
connections to the same provider. Such a setup can usually be done to
multiple routers, through redundant circuit paths, and done at
substantially less cost that two different providers. And, in my
experience, using one provider can often be more reliable than multiple
providers, given how many providers transport facilities ride the same
fiber path, and sometimes the same bundle.
I have to disagree...
About two years ago, maybe less, Sprint was doing some maintenance in
California and was moving stuff through an alternate path in Arizona.
However, while the CA path was off, someone took a backhoe to the AZ
path. Neither the planned outage, the cut, nor myself were in the same
state (I'm in Nevada). It didn't matter how many circuits I had with
Sprint, because none of them worked, including my Sprint cell phone.
However, I was still on the air because my other providers were unaffected.
Locally, yeah, the path in the ground are probably the same. But beyond
that, it can matter, and I strongly recommend multihoming if the story
above is something their organization would like to be protected from.
~Seth
