North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Least Sucky Backbone Provider

  • From: Bradley Urberg Carlson
  • Date: Mon Nov 05 22:57:33 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