I think you're confusing commercial peering agreements with providing customers the ability to advertise their routes via BGP. Two different issues. C. -----Original Message----- From: Jeff S Wheeler [mailto:jsw@five-elements.com] Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 5:11 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Cc: ron@aol.net Subject: Re: the cost of carrying routes Ron, Many carriers require that you advertise a certain minimum number of routes to them over your peering sessions, or they will not peer with you. This suggests that those carriers see routes carried as a point of value, rather than or in addition to one of cost. I have seen 5,000 routes as a minimum used by more than one transit-less carrier. Is this really an operational value perception at these carriers, or is it simply a means of creating a barrier-to-peering? Are fewer, shorter prefixes seen as more valuable than longer ones, e.g. swamp /24s? Is a University or other entity with a legacy /16 more or less valuable as a peer than a growing ISP with a few /20s, and presumably more eyeballs and/or content behind them? -- Jeff S Wheeler <jsw@five-elements.com> On Mon, 2002-10-14 at 16:47, Ron da Silva wrote: *snip*

Do any ISPs charge based on the number of announcements a customer advertises?

If downstream advertisements became mainly smaller prefixes (say /24) that were not aggregatable by you as their upstream ISP, would you answer the above question differently?