We had that same problem and ended up doing it exactly as below, with limited BGP announcements and policy routing all over. The customer also demanded high-bandwidth at low cost, without regard to how good the actual bandwidth was. It was, as you say, graceless. Luckily we convinced them to purchase standard multi-carrier transit. I hope you can do the same :) Cheers, Randal Kohutek
Hello all,
Being relatively new to the colocation business, we run into a fair number of issues that we've never run into before. Got a new one today, and although I can think of kludgey ways to accomplish what he wants, I'd rather get some other ideas first...
We just had our first customer that's requesting bandwidth exclusively through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at less expensive pricing. The money people here are up for it, but obviously, they want to make sure that he's confined to that Cogent connection.
So now of course we're attempting to figure out the best way to do this, and I figured that rather than reinventing the wheel, I'd check to see how others accomplish things like this.
The way I can imagine doing it is by using route-maps to steer all of this customer's traffic out the Cogent pipe, and modifying our BGP announcements by AS prepending on whatever block or blocks we set aside to be "Cogent-exclusive".
Again though, this seems to me to lack a certain amount of, for lack of a better word, "grace".
Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Rick Kunkel