Patrick W.Gilmore wrote: It's just a little difficult for BGP to "load balance" outbound bits when the bulk of the Internet these days is 2 AS hops away from each of four upstreams. Not impossible, but it doesn't happen by default either.

Indeed. If the following conditions are met: a) all four upstreams are transit providers (and therefore even a default to any would be fair game) b) the goal is to distribute more evenly (in terms of bandwidth) the egress traffic between the four upstreams (in other terms, the egress traffic tends to peg one of the upstreams (which are being paid to carry the traffic) for no clear reason) IMHO there is nothing wrong with some WAEG route-map to police egress traffic to a different upstream that the one the BGP process would have chose at the 5th tie-breaker, all 4 including the AS-PATH being equal. My $0.02 plus tax. Michel.