On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 4:26 PM, c b <bz_siege_01@hotmail.com> wrote:
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.
That's the first mistake. Internet w/ BGP is not a mass-market service. Accounting people have no business searching out highly technical custom products and services. Custom services are highly variable in terms of what the service actually delivers. Accounting people are not at all equipped to evaluate them.
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.
It's not unusual for smaller providers who do less BGP to have the engineer work with the customer on the phone to turn up the session without collecting or preparing a bunch of documentation ahead of time. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. They'll have more outages but if they're willing to reprogram routers on the fly they may also be more responsive when you have a problem. And they mayy be more willing to customize your configuration. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>