It was David Gilbert, and the offering was failsafe. --dave On 5/5/25 13:26, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
On 2025-05-05 12:53, Michael Galea via talk wrote:
On 2025-05-04 19:07, David Collier-Brown via talk wrote:
It sent the exact same stream of data down both Rogers and Bell lines. If a packet got dropped, it was replaced by the copy from the other vendor.
This handled censorship, bad cables and outages.
But who was it? I can see him in my mind...
--dave
Could you be thinking about someone running Multilink PPP? I worked for a company that made MLPPP routers in the 80s. Our use of MLPPP was not for diversity, but for dynamic bandwidth allocation. In the 80s, an ISDN connection could be bought from bell as D (16kbps), B+D (64kbps + 16kbps) or 2B+D ((128kbps + 16kbps). We could make a connection on the D channel and dynamically bring of the B channels as traffic exceeded pre-set levels. The router would bond the traffic across the three links. Oh the 80s, when bandwidth was horribly expensive!
BTW, I think Cisco still makes this stuff.
We used multilink pppoe in the early 2000s to bond multiple ADSL channels. If my memory serves me correctly the protocol was only for splitting traffic and not duplicating it.
I guess you could do something like create a custom protocol but that would still leave you with a router on each end and a single path for your traffic from both of those points.
I wounder if dave could be thinking of SCTP which is a protocol and not an ISP.
-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain