another outage. looks like something broke down in one of the upstream routers. a good opportunity to make the case for redundant connections end to end, down to the last km. to become the next utility, as some hope, the internet needs to become far more reliable. what technologies are available to provide redundancy, from the ethernet jack in my notebook up to the backbone routers?

locally, a multihomed setup, deeply connected to a mesh network, is conceivable. routing would have to become link-state aware at the endpoints too (something that today only applies to the backbone routers), picking the best connection out of several at any point. further upstream, better topologies would have to be found to make singular point to point connections the exception rather than the norm. as you get closer to the core of the network, components must not fail. fault-tolerant hardware might provide that additional reliability edge.

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