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

Fri Jan 22 03:40:01 UTC 2016

My first question is, is this the first request for the information which
resulted in this information?  Almost wonder if you're currently dealing
with someone that does only a certain part of the setup and instead of
saying " I don't know " attempted to give an answer that he really has no
idea about.  While they may not be able to provide it today, I can't
believe they can't provide it in advance of the activation.

That being said, we tend to cut the IP allocation anywhere from a day to a
week before the scheduled activation.

You mentioned they were a major player, shouldn't be to difficult to
identify their ASN and then all you need is a placeholder for your peering
IP once they get those allocated to you.  Certainly not as clean as I can
understand mgmt wanting it, but few seconds of replacing x.x.x.x with
1.2.3.4 might be worth the X dollars you're saving.

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.
> (I don't know what etiquette is, so I won't name the carrier... but it's a
> well-known name)
> 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. Now, we've done this 5 or 6
> times over the years with all of our other carriers and this is the first
> one to ever do this. We even escalated to our account manager and they
> still won't provide it.
> I know it's not a huge deal, but life is so much easier when you can
> prestage your cut and rollback commands. In fact, our internal Change
> Management process mandates peer review all proposed config changes and now
> we have to explain why some lines say TBD!
> Is this a common SOP nowadays? Anyone care to explain why they wouldn't
> just provide it ahead of time?
> Thanks in advance.
> CWB