"BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

At home I pay for 5 but just need 2. I have failover to comcast. Works well . And yes I do get reported outages on the att side but because failover works I’ve not chased things down.

Noction is a wonderful example of this. It has sane defaults, but insane customers, who think that it’s a good idea for them to originate more specifics for other outside networks, because they’ll never leak them outside of their own AS (narrator: of course, the prefixes leaked).

I think the most notable example of this recently was Verizon (the insane customer) using Noction (the SD-WAN technology) and doing exactly that, causing mass traffic disruption as they announced more specifics for other peoples prefixes, drawing all that traffic to their own network instead.

The monitoring and SLAs alone are probably the most significant differentiators, with these kinds of services you would usually expect an engineer on site within 4 hours to fix problems, and service credits for anything breaching SLA.

I once accidentally snagged a single mode fibre pigtail while moving stuff in a rack. Everything back up after the provider engineers had re-spliced a new pigtail on in less than two hours.

And that's before you consider the dynamic routing side of things.

(And the 3 x /24's that AS54316 have are also not cheap these days, that would cost something like $30-40k these days).

Two different companies, one provides the last mile, one provides the customer service layered on top.

It adds a lot of flexibility, for instance in this case the person was on-net for Verizon, but what if they were not? Then it wouldn't change at all, just the first NID would be a different provider than Verizon.

Looking at past outages, I feel like given a certain budget, you would get much better uptime with two or more diverse (i.e. not "two fibers going exactly the same path") residential providers than with one commercial one, and for anything but the most critical projects, that's the way to go IMO.

Most importantly though, anything really really important that is so important to use custom fibers should be designed so it also works over the public Internet. Unless degraded service is worse than no service, it doesn't matter that the Internet is theoretically not reliable enough/doesn't provide enough guarantees - at least keep it as a backup so that when a backhoe takes out your custom fiber, you can switch over to the VPN instead of shutting down air traffic at one of Europe's largest airports.

Seems like another major reason for the decision here were SLO/SLAs. Those seem rather meaningless. The residential ISP will not try to max out their 95% SLO - an ISP that's down 1.5 days every month or leaves you offline for 18 days wouldn't be very popular. The commercial SLOs, on the other hand, sound great but they're not magic. If the issue can't be fixed in that time, they will be violated, and you'll typically get a credit for a few months of service - money that you wouldn't have spent in the first place if you just went with residential.

In the end, he still has countless single points of failure, e.g. the above-ground fiber line waiting for a tree, or a non-redundant power supply that he can't easily replace himself. Sure, he has an SLO, but with a dual uplink residential (which is cheaper), a CPE ("modem"/router) failure wouldn't be an outage in a first place.