regarding my suggestion (although terse) with regard to set community no-export. my box ran out of space and mh ate the message (delivered a blank). i would let it go, and continue to look stupid, but i've recieved quite a few messages to let me know that my message was a blank, so to say thank you, please stop now, and to look perhaps even more stupid... :-) press d now or forever conceal your boredom:-), to re-cap, someone described the need to use a purchased connection to sprint (or any other provider) as a customer-traffic-only-peering. the right way to do that would be for the seller to engineer a community that accomplished sending routes to their own customer networks, but not advertising those routes to any of their non-transit peers. given that a majority of the networks that connect to large providers are not bgp speakers (are within the provider's own AS) and those that do speak bgp either take a limited set of routes and have alternate connectivity (ie. a transit provider) or take a limited set of routes and generate default from some of those routes, i thought that a simple work-around for the case of a provider (A) who would like to buy bandwidth from another provider (S) rather than burn interconnect bandwidth for traffic to and from that same provider (S) would be to set no-export on the advertised routes to that provider (S). Given that the provider (A) already had global reachability and only wanted to get to the other provider's (S) customers through the bandwidth purchased from that provider (S) set no-export fails for those customers of the provider (S) who are singly-homed to provider (S) and are default-free. ie, if another network (X) takes full routes from the provider (S) and has no other connectivity and no gateway of last resort, provider (A) is not visible to the original network (X). i didn't think of this case, i can't think of why someone would want to be homed to only one provider and be default-free, but i'm sure that there's a reason. the other part of the message was to point out the sh ip bgp nei a.b.c.d adv command which others have already done. Jeff Young young@mci.net