the cost of carrying routes

Mon Oct 14 21:11:10 UTC 2002

Ron,

Many carriers require that you advertise a certain minimum number of
routes to them over your peering sessions, or they will not peer with
you.  This suggests that those carriers see routes carried as a point of
value, rather than or in addition to one of cost.  I have seen 5,000
routes as a minimum used by more than one transit-less carrier.

Is this really an operational value perception at these carriers, or is
it simply a means of creating a barrier-to-peering?  Are fewer, shorter
prefixes seen as more valuable than longer ones, e.g. swamp /24s?  Is a
University or other entity with a legacy /16 more or less valuable as a
peer than a growing ISP with a few /20s, and presumably more eyeballs
and/or content behind them?

--
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at five-elements.com>

On Mon, 2002-10-14 at 16:47, Ron da Silva wrote:
*snip*
> Do any ISPs charge based on the number of announcements a customer
> advertises?
> 
> If downstream advertisements became mainly smaller prefixes (say /24)
> that were not aggregatable by you as their upstream ISP, would you
> answer the above question differently?