[c-nsp] BGP peer/customer routes

[Pshem Kowalczyk]

Hi,

On 1 June 2011 06:31, vince anton <mvanton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all
>
{cut}
>
> it surprises me that some people seem to be ok with passing transit traffic
> over a peering link. I dont understand why you would want to do this, as to
> me this seems abuse or misconfiguration (possibly not intentional), and
> potentially very expensive, or loss of revenue.
>

The loss of revenue depends on your charging model. Obviously with a
flat fee if the customer uses the link or not doesn't matter. If you
charge them per 'volume' or 'peak usage' then they are will pay less
but also use less. If they send your peer a more specific prefix that
peer is most likely advertising it to the 'Internet' anyway, which
means that the peers of yours (and not you) attract the traffic for
that prefix.

This setup can be a very useful from customer's perspective when they
do traffic load-balancing (for whatever reason). This is also useful
if they use multihoming for backup reasons (as was mentioned already
in this thread). Another reason for setup like that is 'disjointed'
customer sites using the same AS. There probably many other reason for
not blocking this sort of arrangement.

If your T&C clearly do not allow that you can try to police it, but
IMHO that adds a lot of complexity to your setup. If the customer
doesn't want to attract traffic through you for whatever reason I
suggest you rather give them tools (like BGP communities that set
local preference within your AS) to do it. This way you'll have
control (and visibility) of what's going on.

kind regards
Pshem