Ever thought of Multihoming?

MultiHoming?! I was thinking of it just a few days ago and it just hit me today, but im missing a few things to complete the Pro's and Con's Id love to do it, with a friend maybe around 50 miles away on a totally different Backbone connection(Virgin Media) with a healthy 100mbps i have just under half of that on BT we know the concept of Multihoming is for reliability and speed but is it possible just for Residential to do it? I mean we pretty much have control of the backbone of the network(Within reason) on what we send and receive through it, so why not speed. Would anyone like to shed some light too like what it takes, and how it works fully?
Thanks(Hope im in the right category)

What has your friend got to do with it, except as a point of interest that he has a faster connection than you? I'm asking in case you think it matters. (And please don't type everything in bold. It hurts my eyes .

Edited by RobertoS (Wed 05-Mar-14 18:21:03)

Depends what you mean by multihoming.

To do it properly and not be dependent on a single network, you'll need some IP space from RIPE (v4 and v6) but you cannot get PI space any more, so you'd need PA which means becoming a RIPE LIR.

You'd then need an AS and at least two providers who will offer you BGP feed and a session for each. You then advertise your IP prefixes and job done. You would also need hardware to run the session, either an all in one box like a Juniper SRX220 or Linux box running quagga/zebra.

You may however mean something more like load-balancing which is a completely different way of "multihoming".

Matt

Hi Matt, Thanks for that lovely technical Info, I think i may have slipped up on the meaning, you could be right with the second option. Load-Balancing, but wouldn't that still come under the Multi-Homing section?

Edited by IamFibremad (Thu 06-Mar-14 17:47:05)

Are you wanting to provide you and your friend with an alternative connection if your primary one goes down?

Not that cheap to do unfortunately as you would both require too connections, one each to the outside world and one configured as tunnel between your two routers but as Matt says it would require a bit more than your average consumer router to do this.

If you both just want a backup connection for emergency use a simpler solution might be to buy a router such as a Billion 7800DXL which has the capability to use a a 3 or 4G dongle as a backup and can be configured to failover to this if the primary connection fails but this would require additional outlay on either credit if you use pay as you go or a contract.

Edited by techguy (Thu 06-Mar-14 18:56:48)