I'm not criticizing Sprint, for this policy, only confirming the fact that I received similar information about their requirements to use Cisco equipment. I've had my share of bad experiences with customers buying some El Cheapo brand router and throwing it in my lap to deal with. I have my official list of routers & CSU/DSU's that I support (Cisco's are on that list) and for anything else the customer is on their own. On the other hand I wasn't asking Sprint to manage my router for me either and would hope that they would peer with any "reasonable" router that I might have if I could demonstrate to them that I was competent in bgp4 routing with it and that it would not cause them any problems.

...

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.

I suspect two problems.

Some [potential] cvustomers are not hearing clearly, or Sprint has some internal communication problem that is leaking out to customers. Probably more of the latter then the former, but likely a bit of both.

But the tough question is what to do when a customer wants to attach something 'strange'. We're a few decades past the Carterphone decision, so we probably should let the customer do it. But how much are we obliged to debug it for them? And how are we compensated for our efforts beyond those to which we are used?

randy