Two BGP peering sessions on single Comcast Fiber Connection?

Mon Oct 17 13:29:58 UTC 2016

I completely concur.  We spread our uplinks across separate boxes and we have /29 allocations.  Get the best of all worlds. But if I only had one provider, I'd want to have multiple BGP sessions for this reason.  

> On Oct 17, 2016, at 08:30, Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
> 
> It really seems like it's a grave oversight to *NOT* support multiple BGP sessions. I drop to two routers for that same reason, I can do maintenance on one, while the other carries traffic. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----- 
> Mike Hammett 
> Intelligent Computing Solutions 
> http://www.ics-il.com 
> 
> Midwest-IX 
> http://www.midwest-ix.com 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> 
> From: "Mike Poublon" <mpoublon at secantnet.net> 
> To: "rar" <rar at syssrc.com>, nanog at nanog.org 
> Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2016 2:04:29 PM 
> Subject: Re: Two BGP peering sessions on single Comcast Fiber Connection? 
> 
> I started a thread around the same topic back on 10/16 of 2014. A 
> Comcast engineer (who ultimately spoke to the national product manager) 
> came back after discussing and said the same thing "We don't support 
> that". I got a slightly longer explanation of: 
> 
> -------------------------------------------- 
> 
> In a nutshell, when we design a product we do it to accommodate the most 
> typical customer cases. 
> Given that the design includes a single fiber path and thus the fiber 
> path and device that terminates on either end each are a single point of 
> failure, adding extra BGP sessions doesn’t seem to add value in the 
> typical failure scenarios. In order to achieve the simplest and most 
> scalable solution to address the market, we rely on narrowing the 
> possible combinations of parameters. 
> 
> -------------------------------------------- 
> 
> I explained to them that their interpretation prevents me from being 
> able to do concurrent maintenance on my side (single router 
> reboot/upgrade, etc). Never got anywhere with it though. 
> 
> I'm still interested in having this set up, but have given up on it ever 
> really coming to reality. Luckily ALL of my other providers were more 
> than happy to set up an extra session. 
> 
> If anyone from Comcast is listening, there is customer demand for this. 
> It's not about making it better for Comcast, it's about allowing 
> customers to have more flexibility. 
> 
> Mike Poublon 
> 
> /Senior Datacenter Network Engineer/ 
> 
> *Secant Technologies* 
> 
> 6395 Technology Ave. Suite A 
> 
> Kalamazoo, MI 49009 
> 
>> On 10/13/2016 1:48 PM, rar wrote: 
>> After a many month wait, we were ready to turn up our BGP peering sessions on a new Comcast fiber connection. 
>> 
>> With our other providers (Level 3 and Verizon) we have edge routers that directly connect between the provider's on premise connection and our primary and a backup core routers. Each core router has a multihop BGP session with the provider's BGP router. The goal is to keep the single BGP router from being a single point of failure. 
>> 
>> Comcast said they could not support two separate BGP peering sessions on the same circuit. Does anyone have any counter examples? We used to have this setup with Comcast 5+ years ago, but now they say they can't support it. 
>> 
>> 
>> Bob Roswell 
>> broswell at syssrc.com<mailto:broswell at syssrc.com> 
>> 410-771-5544 ext 4336 
>> 
>> Computer Museum Highlights<http://museum.syssrc.com/>
> 
> 