Re: Is multihoming hard? [was: DNS amplification]

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 20, 2013, at 10:25 AM, John Curran <jcurran () istaff org> wrote:

> On Mar 20, 2013, at 7:25 AM, Owen DeLong <owen () delong com> wrote:
>
> > > And please don't reply with "then why can't I run BGP on my [cable|DSL|etc.] link?" Broadband providers are not 
> > > trying to throttle growth by not allowing grandma to do BGP, and swapping to LISP or anything else won't change 
> > > that.
> >
> > Sure they are. If they weren't, it would be relatively straight forward to add the necessary options to DHCP for a 
> > minimal (accept default, advertise local) BGP configuration and it would be quite simple for CPE router 
> > manufacturers to incorporate those capabilities.
> >
> > The problem is BGP doesn't scale to that level and everyone knows it, so, we limit growth by not allowing it to be a 
> > possibility.
>
> I suspect it has nothing to do with the scaling properties of 
> routing tables and everything to do with customer support costs.
>
> The metrics associated with broadband services are quite daunting;
> i.e. costs from a  single technical customer support call can exceed 
> the entire expected profit over the typical customer contract period...

An interesting idea. In my case, I average about 3 calls per month to Comcast. I suspect this more than consumes the 
$99/month I pay them for internet service. Further, I often get service credits out of those calls that further reduce 
their income.

If they provided native dual-stack with BGP and their service didn't go down on a regular basis, it would result in 
fewer calls, at least from me.

> In such circumstances, you really don't want any quantity of residential 
> customers running BGP, as it increases the probability of customer care
> calls.  It's only at a different revenue point (i.e. "small-business 
> service") that it becomes viable.

I don't want the residential customers themselves running BGP at all. However, if there were motivation on the provider 
side, automated BGP configuration could enable consumers to attach to multiple providers and actually reduce support 
calls significantly.

Owen