consistent policy != consistent announcements

Sat Mar 15 11:22:02 UTC 1997

> Is there any *customer-led* reason why one might not want to prefer
> customer routes over peer routes? (i.e. not "it saves me doing some
> backhaul as I can dump the traffic off to the customers other
> provider"). 

Yes.  Suppose that I am "M", and I have two providers "A" and "B".  The
links M/A and M/B are expensive international links, much lower bandwidth
than I would like, and prone to congestion.  Further suppose that A is a
customer of R, and B is a peer of R.  For load balancing reasons, I would
like R to send some of my traffic via A and some via B.  Since I pay A and
B for transit, and A pays R for transit, and A and B both agree to play
along with my desire to load balance, it's reasonable for us to ask R to
do this.  From R's point of view, their customer A and their indirect
customer M have asked them to treat peer routes (via B) and customer
routes (via A) to destinations in M as being equivalent.

--apb (Alan Barrett)