Is FRR protection good enough?

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1

Hi,

I am doing some research on the backup routing issue.

I know Fast ReRoute bypass routing such as MPLS FRR is used by many
networks.
You may have experienced with this thing pretty well, and can teach me a
little bit.

My question is: current FRR scheme seems only guarantee network reachability
under link/node failure, but not bandwidth (say, if my primary link is
carrying 1Gbps, but my bypass path has a capacity of only 100Mbps, then the
bandwidth for the traffic under failure is limited). Do you think the
reachability level of protection is good enough? Has anyone here
encountered any issues with FRR (say, bypass routing could not save your
network service during unexpected accident, e.g., concurrent failures of
multiple devices)? Is there any example case (or any news and reports
regarding this question) I can study?

Another thing I want to understand is: if I want to protect a lot of
links/nodes (in addition to a few major ones), is the configuration job easy
of difficult? My knowledge so far tells me that it is not easy at all. I
don't know what is going on in practice. If you can share your experience
with me, it will be great.

Many Thanks,
sando

2

That's a total "it depends" question. We've had several instances where
backhoe fade or hardware issues have killed our primary off-site link and taken
80% of our bandwidth with it, and we just put up a "The Internet Will Be Slow
For A Bit" notice and keep going, as most of our traffic is basically bulk data
transfer and we're OK as long as all the bits eventually arrive. For other
organizations, the resulting slowdown may be totally unacceptable - if you're
doing a lot of video streaming or VoIP, it would be fatal.