help find a way to make me redundant

April 27, 2009 2:12 PM

My boss is looking for the most efficient and cost-effective way to add redundancy to our 20MB fiber.

After 4 years of near perfect service, our provider had a large (8 hour) downtime recently. In order to avoid this in the future we've decided to stop putting off getting a redundant line that does not share the same point of entry as the fiber. We're looking for at least a t-1 that will kick in as soon as the fiber fails (just to keep data flowing), hopefully used far less than an hour a year. After looking, we've not been able to find metered service or what seems to be a reasonable rate in our area.

What experience has anyone else had with this kind of thing? Does anyone know of anyone out there (we're in Daytona Beach) that will charge us a reasonable fee ($500 a month is the cheapest we've found so far for a single t-1!) just to be hooked up to their network and not use their service, plus whatever we do end up using? Are we even going about this in the best manner?

I keep thinking that if we had had a metered line for $200 a month for the last 4 years, they'd have made ten thousand dollars off of us for maybe ten hours and 20 GB total bandwidth. Why WOULDN'T a company want to do this?

posted by dozo to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Have you ever thought of using a normal business cable line? Since yo uwill only be using it in case of emergencies why go with using a $200 a month t-1 when you can get a $75 a month cable line?
posted by majortom1981 at 2:25 PM on April 27

We are going to need to use BGP, which doesn't work with anything less than a T1.

I WISH we could get away with a RR Turbo connection.
posted by dozo at 2:42 PM on April 27

I haven't worked with BGP, but if you're already going with that heavy-duty of a routing solution I'd have thought you could simply go with five or six RR Turbo connections; if you're setting up custom control of the routing I would think you wouldn't even have to do anything special except setting up the routing rules themselves. It says in that Wikipedia article in the section on local selection, If there is more than one route still tied at this point, several BGP implementations offer a configurable option to load-share among the routes You could even go with three cable connections + three DSL lines for extra extra redundancy.

(Though there quite possibly is some aspect of it I don't understand. But think of all the TV you would get to watch!)
posted by XMLicious at 3:08 PM on April 27

BGP doesn't know how fast your connection is.
posted by rokusan at 3:12 PM on April 27

I think he means he needs a provider that he can announce his own ASN to in a BGP setup (eg: not a standard business DSL or cable connection). That'll be a $500/month RBOC T1.
posted by thewalrus at 3:17 PM on April 27

BGP does, however, need a /24 network assignment to justify your own ASN. It's a relatively simple protocol but does have it's difficulties in implementation.

If you're not taking inbound connections, look at something like an IP SLA tracked routing in your router. Even if you are taking occasional inbound connections some dns trickery might be preferable to the BGP overhead both in technical implementation and (if you're running cisco) advanced ip feature set licenses on your router(s).
posted by devbrain at 3:20 PM on April 27

what devbrain said, and there's a one-time cost plus recurring cost with ARIN to maintain your own ASN. if you intend to take a full routing table from two different upstreams you will need a reasonably powerful router with 1GB+ of RAM (eg: Not a Cisco 2800/3800 series. Budget minimum about $10k for the router). Have you looked into a point to point wireless link to some CLEC which will be idle 99% of the time?
posted by thewalrus at 3:23 PM on April 27

just to be clear, do you have a 20MBps or a 20Mbps fiber circuit? Because 20Mbps can be easily accomplished with wireless ethernet bridges from a variety of vendors, it'll plug right into your existing router. If you're doing 20 megaBYTES per second (200Mbps+) and don't have a redundant point of entry for fiber into the building, perhaps you should consider relocating all of the equipment which needs to be online 24/7 to a carrier neutral colo.
posted by thewalrus at 3:29 PM on April 27

It's 20Mbps. I was afraid that this was going to be the answer...
posted by dozo at 4:13 PM on April 27

I'd talk to your local cable company. They'll almost certainly BGP peer with you; it just won't be handled through the residential/small-business department. They'll also let you use real CPE at this level (Ciscos with DOCSIS WICs or etc) instead of foisting off some consumer piece of junk on you. I don't know how much they will charge for this, though.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 4:56 PM on April 27

Get two lines @ half the speed. Use them both.
posted by gjc at 6:12 PM on April 27