Least Sucky Backbone Provider

Tue Nov 6 04:01:07 UTC 2007

On Nov 5, 2007, at 9:51 AM, Gregory Boehnlein wrote:

> 	I'm considering dropping Cogent completely out of my transit mix, as
> the number of outages and problems they have been experienced over  
> the past
> year has reached an unacceptable level. It has gotten to the point  
> that we
> their BGP session is shutdown for longer periods than it is on.

There can still be problems over peering links between your new Stable  
Carrier and some Unstable Carrier.  If such a problem affects your  
traffic, then you may want to tell your carrier not to advertise your  
prefixes to the Unstable Carrier at all, which you can do using  
redistribution/traffic engineering communities.  If your Stable  
Carrier doesn't support these, and your tolerance for pain is less  
than theirs, then you may even have to shut down your connections to  
Stable Carrier to keep Unstable Carrier's problem from affecting your  
own customers.

So who supports these communities?  A cursory reading of  www.onesc.net/communities 
  says:

-L3 supports TE-community-based prepends to all its peers (?)
-Savvis to Tier-1s plus Cogent, XO, Telia
-GBLX to Tier-1s plus Cogent, XO, Telia
-Telia Sonera to Tier-1s plus Cogent, XO, TWTC
-Qwest to Tier-1s plus XO
-Sprint to Tier-1s
-XO to some Tier-1s (lacks Qwest, NTT)

Networks which may not support redist/TE communities:

Verizon
NTT/Verio
AT&T
TWTC
Cogent

(let me know if I'm in error)

These communities are useful when there are networks that  (A) are  
unstable, and (B) carry/send important traffic to your network.   I'd  
look for support of traffic engineering via redist. communities when   
shopping for a "stable" carrier.

Bradley