Sprint and peering points

Sun Apr 1 06:47:09 UTC 2001

You basically have it correct.

An entity that peers with UUNET and Sprint at a public point would now see

1239 1239 20001
701 20001

This then effectively shifts the load to one of my other transit providers (701)
instead of splitting it between 1239 and 701.  A worse case is would be if  I
was using 701 for backup and the route was 701 20001 20001.

So by making the change Sprint unilaterally shifts the transit packets from a
public peering point away from themselves.

What would have been nice is for Sprint to tell its customers it was doing
this.  Then I would have expected the change in inbound traffic flows and taken
action.  As it was, I opened a trouble report and wasted a lot of time looking
for a problem.

Deepak Jain wrote:

> I am not exactly clear on the impact. For peers that HAVE private
> interconnections with Sprint, the traffic will still pass to Sprint. For
> networks that only have public interconnections with Sprint, Sprint customer
> traffic will traverse normally as well.
>
> The networks that fall outside of this category are networks that you don't
> have a direct customer connection with, which are choosing amongst your N
> available transit providers to pass traffic to you. If any of these networks
> had a private interconnect with Sprint, there would be no effect.
>
> So, if I logic'd this out correctly, the networks that are affected HAVE
> peering with Sprint, but ONLY at public access points. I'm assuming this is
> really significant to your traffic flow. What would Sprint notifying you of
> this change do for you?
>
> Deepak Jain
> AiNET
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
> Roy
> Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2001 11:22 AM
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Sprint and peering points
>
> Since I am located in what PacBell thinks is a rural area, I have to contend
> with using multiple T1s.  This forces me to play with the AS paths in order
> to load balance between my upstreams (Sprint and others)
>
> I have found that Sprint is prepending their AS when sending routes to many
> of the public exchanges (example "1239 1239 20001") in order to "shift load"
> to private peer connections.
>
> The result is that now my other upstreams that send out the normal "701
> 20001" get the brunt of the traffic from the public exchange points.
>
> Needless to say I am a bit pissed at Sprint for doing this and not telling
> me.  I had been a fan of Sprint until this happened.  Anyone else out there
> seeing the same problems?  Any ideas on how to cure it
>
> Roy Engehausen