I spoke to a sprint salesperson about 2 weeks ago and was told that I could not get any kind of BGP4 peering with Sprint unless I had a Cisco 7000 series router.
This is my experience also, althought I was able to get my sales weasel to say that they might except a 45xx series if it had sufficient memory, as some "exceptions" had been granted on a "case by case" basis.
As a reseller of IP services they will not manage my router for me, but said I still had to have a Cisco(tm) router, even if I'm not peering BGP.
Jay Stewart
I won't say there's "no way they can know", but basically they really shouldn't. If you disable incoming telnet to your Bay box and tell them it's a cisco with "cdp disabled", they shouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Of course, you'd best know how the hell to configure the bay box if you want to go this route.
Avi
Actually, I was planning to change the login prompt on my BSDI box to User Access Verification Password: Rob