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Single-homed customers have sites that
connect to the Internet via a single connection to a service provider.
The figure illustrates such a situation. These customers can usually be
adequately served by pointing defaults toward the provider. The provider
can also install static routing to reach the customer. This method is
the least expensive and the most effective. The customer router does not
need to learn any of the Internet routing table, substantially reducing
memory usage and processing overhead. In this case, there is no issue of
route symmetry because traffic has a single entrance and exit point.
Single-homed sites generally rely on a
single connection to the Internet. Backup is not an issue. If the
connection is lost, the customer can tolerate the outage until it is
fixed. Obviously, such an arrangement would not satisfy mission-critical
data communication requirements. A single-homed site with no backup
access would not be appropriate for applications needing high levels of
reliability.
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