Advice on dealing with Sprint

Thu Sep 26 12:50:20 UTC 1996

On Thu, 26 Sep 1996 01:45:57 -0400 (EDT), freedman at netaxs.com writes:
>
>> > I spoke to a sprint salesperson about 2 weeks ago and was told that I
>> > could not get any kind of BGP4 peering with Sprint unless I had a
>> > Cisco 7000 series router.

That brings up an interesting question.  I've been told now that I can
in fact connect to Sprint, but am I going to be able to do BGP4 peering?
The connection would be pretty worthless without that, as I have several
networks I need to announce, and expect to get a full routing table back
from Sprint.  What is Sprint's official policy on this?

>> This is my experience also, althought I was able to get my sales 
>> weasel to say that they might except a 45xx series if it had 
>> sufficient memory, as some "exceptions" had been granted on a "case 
>> by case" basis.
>> 
>> As a reseller of IP services they will not manage my router for me, 
>> but said I still had to have a Cisco(tm) router, even if I'm not 
>> peering BGP.

>I won't say there's "no way they can know", but basically they really
>shouldn't.  If you disable incoming telnet to your Bay box and tell
>them it's a cisco with "cdp disabled", they shouldn't be able to
>tell the difference.

I considered that, actually. :)

>Of course, you'd best know how the hell to configure the bay box
>if you want to go this route.

That goes without saying.  If I didn't know how to configure it, I'd go
buy a 2500 and let someone else manage it for me, like many other ISPs do.
As it is, I'm quite familiar with how my routers work, and what their
capabilities are.  I wish other people were.. I'm always surprised when
engineers from MCI tell me "Oh, Bay Networks can't do BGP4" (ignoring the
fact that I *am* doing it with them.)  I have two Bay BCN routers here,
each card in the router has a 60MHz processor and 64MB of memory.  One 
processor card is designated as the BGP soloist, and *all* it does is
process BGP.  If I want one, I can get a processor card that has dual
PPC chips on it that will run as a BGP soloist.  If anyone thinks Bay
can't do BGP4, I'd be happy to give them a tour. :)

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