Is it normal for your provider to withhold BGP peering info until the night of the cut?

William Herrin bill at herrin.us
Thu Jan 21 22:13:33 UTC 2016


On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 4:26 PM, c b <bz_siege_01 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> We have 4 full-peering providers between two data centers. Our
> accounting people did some shopping and found that there was
> a competitor who came in substantially lower this year and
> leadership decided to swap our most expensive circuit to the new carrier.

That's the first mistake. Internet w/ BGP is not a mass-market
service. Accounting people have no business searching out highly
technical custom products and services. Custom services are highly
variable in terms of what the service actually delivers. Accounting
people are not at all equipped to evaluate them.


> Anyways, we were preparing for the circuit cutover and asked
> for the BGP peering info up front like we normally do. This carrier
> said that they don't provide this until the night of the cut.

It's not unusual for smaller providers who do less BGP to have the
engineer work with the customer on the phone to turn up the session
without collecting or preparing a bunch of documentation ahead of
time. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. They'll have more
outages but if they're willing to reprogram routers on the fly they
may also be more responsive when you have a problem. And they mayy be
more willing to customize your configuration.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>



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