Do they expect consistent route annoucements from their peers?
Many networks out there insist upon this as a requirement when peering.
While many networks insist on this as a requirement when peering, few folks audit it, and fewer still take action as a result of noticing inconsistent announcements. "it's only illegal if you get caught". I think vaf@bbn/genu used to actively audit and unicastedly communicate this stuff and catch errors folks made. There was always discrepancy between what the views should look like, but it was usually noise. I think the filter was something like 1% or such, scaled to the number of routes announced. This was a good first pass filter to see if someone was actively screwing you. I recall that a network at which I worked ran a similar consistency checking script, and we'd find and watch what folks were doing. Normally it was 'in the noise' but if it was significant we'd ask them to fix it. If they didn't fix it, well the implied threat was that we'd 'depeer' but it never got to that. The real reason for this 'consistent announcement' thing was (at least to me, being one who wrangled the lawyers that wrote the peering policy before jsb took that stick) to prevent folks from forcing us to carry more of a peer's traffic, and to prevent a customer from doing closest exit on us, w/out letting us do closest exit to them. jmalcolm + sherk even had a scheme by which we'd set the BGP NH of all learned routes to a particular IP address, say "10.1.1.1" and then static route that 10.1.1.1/32 destination out all applicable peering interfaces. In this manner we'd just have a given /32 destination for each peer, and assign their routes to that. We never put it into practice because a/ the problem wasn't great, and b/ there were some "quote" technical "unquote" issues with this solution. Bottom line, this inconsistency issue is not significant.
wouldn't this mean that they wouldn't have consistent route announcments in various parts of their network?
My recollection of the issues being discussed are that they are inconsequential in practice, and resolution lays in the hands of the customer. -a