Is it normal for your provider to withhold BGP peering info until the night of the cut?

Thu Jan 21 23:13:22 UTC 2016

Sounds like you need a little posturing with your sales team and account manager on the phone. Threaten to cancel the contract and site their lack of support and willingness to help you be successful. Say they're interfering with your company's ability to do business. If their sales team is worth anything they'll jump all over trying to fix the problem. If not, cancel the contract and move on. Do you and your company's mgmt want to deal with someone that unhelpful? Imagine what happens when you have a problem..

Ian Mock

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of c b
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2016 3:27 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Is it normal for your provider to withhold BGP peering info until the night of the cut?

We have 4 full-peering providers between two data centers. Our accounting people did some shopping and found that there was a competitor who came in substantially lower this year and leadership decided to swap our most expensive circuit to the new carrier. 
(I don't know what etiquette is, so I won't name the carrier... but it's a well-known name) Anyways, we were preparing for the circuit cutover and asked for the BGP peering info up front like we normally do. This carrier said that they don't provide this until the night of the cut. Now, we've done this 5 or 6 times over the years with all of our other carriers and this is the first one to ever do this. We even escalated to our account manager and they still won't provide it.
I know it's not a huge deal, but life is so much easier when you can prestage your cut and rollback commands. In fact, our internal Change Management process mandates peer review all proposed config changes and now we have to explain why some lines say TBD!
Is this a common SOP nowadays? Anyone care to explain why they wouldn't just provide it ahead of time?
Thanks in advance.
CWB 		 	   		  