Re: wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper seeking advice on building a nationwide network

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

> If you open the door to that sort of interpretation, then every org with a T1 and a backup dial-up connection can 
> claim to be "multihomed".
You say that like it's a bad thing.

> In either of these cases, it's not enough to just have the connection. The ARIN NRPM definition of Multihomed 
> includes "has one or more routing prefixes announced by at least two of its upstream ISPs."  Are you really going to 
> announce your prefix[es] to both your real provider _and_ your ridiculously low bandwidth provider?  Even if you 
> prepend the latter considerably, you're likely to receive some traffic via that path.

If you have a GRE tunnel to each of 2 ISPs and announce your route over BGP to them, or, have some other configuration 
with them and they both announce your prefix to the rest of the world, that meets the ARIN test. The rest is an issue 
for the network administrator and not a matter for ARIN policy.

ARIN policy does not require your network to be functional or even useful. It's up to each administrator to decide how 
they want to operate their network and what level of dysfunction/lost packets they consider acceptable.

> > It's a slippery slope from "v.90 not good enough" to "less than 2xOCn not
> > good enough" where n can be adjusted to suitably limit competition...
>
> Perhaps the manual should be updated to replace "full-time connectivity" with something a bit more fleshed out 
> specifying that the full-time connectivity be via dedicated circuit [frame-relay permanent virtual circuits included, 
> if you can still find a LEC willing to sell them] or PTP wireless.

I would oppose such a policy change. I believe it is out of scope for ARIN's mission of address administration.

Owen