[ih] Internet without entrenched factions?

[Dave Crocker]

On 5/15/2026 1:19 PM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote:
>      > From: Brian E Carpenter
>      > Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed ... We don't know
>      > how to support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens
>      > of millions of small and medium enterprises.
>
> ...
>
> Basically, TANSTAAFL. Site multi-homing gives benefits; benefits usually
> aren't free; somebody has to pay.


Since I found myself with an operational activity from my home and my 
ISP went out for some day and my cell-phone fallback was not up to the 
task, I bought an OTC router that permits multi-homing and got an 
account with a second ISP.  (And per my insight of some decades ago, I 
have both be active, rather than have the second be on hot standby and 
hopefully start performing when it is needed.)

The multi-homed router does NAT, so my internal hosts don't see any 
functional -- or even addressing -- difference depending on which ISP is 
used for a connection.

This does provide simple, cheap, useful operational redundancy.

What it does not do is maintain a connection across an ISP failure.

Back when this topic was active 25-30 years ago, I suggested putting a 
shim between the app and TCP, providing an appearance of a TCP 
connection to the app, but mapping it down to multiple, alternative 
connections over different ISPs. This could then be robust and maintain 
a TCP connection across ISP failures.

When I was researching this, I discovered that the design of TLS is 
actually of an extensible session layer, which probably would make 
possible to do a design that could be deployed as just an upgrade to the 
TLS software.

Never got any interest in the approach.

And from what I recall, neither did any other approach.  This suggests 
that the Internet is simply much too reliable to motivate people for an 
additional robustness layer...

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker

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