Notifying customers of upstream modifications

Keegan Holley keegan.holley at sungard.com
Thu Dec 29 02:51:12 UTC 2011


Most transit networks have some sort of blanket notification that they can
send to customers.  Something like between 12AM and 6AM sometime next week
you may or may not have a moderate or severe impact, but we're not going to
give you details.  It also depends on the peering that is being added or
removed.  The larger providers are mostly static.  I can't imagine Level 3
permanently depeering from Verizon for example.  Also, if paths change but
latency and hop count are still acceptable most customers will not notice
the change.  The same goes for outages.  Also, where do you draw the line.
For example if someone severs a peering with a content network like google
some of their downstreams will care others will not.  If ISP's notified
everyone of every change it would more or less become spam so I can see an
argument for both.  In large transit networks it probably comes down to the
predicted impact of the a particular change versus visibility and
contractual liabilities.


2011/12/28 Andy Susag <asusag at ifncom.net>

> Hi All,
>
>
>
> Just a quick question for those of you running ISPs with BGP
> downstreams.
>
>
>
> If you add or remove an upstream provider to your network, do you
> provide notification to your downstream customers? Likely, it would
> cause a shift in their traffic. If they are peering with multiple ISPs
> themselves, they may see a traffic flux.
>
>
>
> I know for a fact that our upstreams do not notify us of events so we
> tend to not send out these sort of notifications. Just wonder what
> everyone else does or if anyone happens to know "best practice"
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andy
>
>
>
>
>



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