[j-nsp] Policy Statement Question

[Pete Templin]

Chris Davies wrote:

> The issue I'm working with now is that we buy transit from two 
> providers, a Tier 1 (Cogent) and a Tier 2 (Internap) if you wanted to 
> use 'old' terms.  The problem I am running into is that since Internap 
> is technically a Tier 2 (they buy transit from Tier 1 providers), only 
> 25k of the 175k routes have shorter ASPaths to the destination.
> 
> Since Internap is only adding 1 router hop and 1 AS Hop, I should ASPad 
> on Cogent's side.  That would perhaps level the playing field for 
> inbound traffic.

InterNAP is probably adding two router hops (one "row" of routers to 
upstreams, one "row" of routers to customers), but that's picking nits. 
  However, if you're trying to balance inbound traffic, I'm surprised to 
hear that you have more traffic coming in on Cogent.  Since InterNAP 
buys transit, they normally receive customer-level local preference in 
their transit providers' networks, and therefore all of those networks 
prefer to reach you through InterNAP, period.  Any of those networks' 
peers may then rely on AS path length though.

> AS Padding on my exports should result in inbound traffic perhaps 
> choosing a better path since the ASPath's across Cogent and Internap 
> would be a little more balanced.  When I add another provider alongside 
> these two, if it is another Tier 1 provider, I would probably need to 
> pad their incoming as well.

When you say "pad their incoming" as well, I think you're referring to 
inbound routes and therefore outbound traffic.  In this case, yes you 
may want to prepend what you learn from Cogent and others.

pt