mgcarley
Founder, Hayai Broadband
Most of the ISPs buy Bandwidth from others. That's a common scenario. I don't think any such case will arise where the Networks are down, because these High Capacity Fibre Links are bound by Service Level Agreements that ensure guaranteed uptime.
Apparently this is not the case. Beam's edge routers do not announce themselves to any of the other networks Border Gateway Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Probably they have redundant circuits leading in to their central office (if one goes down the other kicks in) which reduces the possibility of a complete outage in the event of damage to physical media or something like that, but if those cables end up in the same place (not likely, but you never know), that could create a problem - SLA or not. In my experience, SLAs are rarely stuck to, but in addition, SLAs in India rarely go as high as five-9's anyway, so the tolerance for downtime is still there.
What would be of concern is 100% of Beam's bandwidth comes from Tata, it still works out as a single point of failure if, for instance, someone screws up a BGP table at either end or accidentally performs some route filtering - that ISP could disappear entirely from the internet very easily, and this would not be covered by an SLA.
For me it's more that I personally wouldn't want to risk "putting all my eggs in one basket".
Apparently this is not the case. Beam's edge routers do not announce themselves to any of the other networks Border Gateway Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Probably they have redundant circuits leading in to their central office (if one goes down the other kicks in) which reduces the possibility of a complete outage in the event of damage to physical media or something like that, but if those cables end up in the same place (not likely, but you never know), that could create a problem - SLA or not. In my experience, SLAs are rarely stuck to, but in addition, SLAs in India rarely go as high as five-9's anyway, so the tolerance for downtime is still there.
What would be of concern is 100% of Beam's bandwidth comes from Tata, it still works out as a single point of failure if, for instance, someone screws up a BGP table at either end or accidentally performs some route filtering - that ISP could disappear entirely from the internet very easily, and this would not be covered by an SLA.
For me it's more that I personally wouldn't want to risk "putting all my eggs in one basket".
