Consider the robust network design problem of finding a minimum cost network
with enough capacity to route all traffic demand matrices in a given polytope.
We investigate the impact of different routing models in this robust setting:
in particular, we compare \emph{oblivious} routing, where the routing between
each terminal pair must be fixed in advance, to \emph{dynamic} routing, where
routings may depend arbitrarily on the current demand. Our main result is a
construction that shows that the optimal cost of such a network based on
oblivious routing (fractional or integral) may be a factor of
\BigOmega(\log{n}) more than the cost required when using dynamic routing.
This is true even in the important special case of the asymmetric hose model.
This answers a question in \cite{chekurisurvey07}, and is tight up to constant
factors. Our proof technique builds on a connection between expander graphs and
robust design for single-sink traffic patterns \cite{ChekuriHardness07}