(Note, I'm not trying to place blame at any party here. Just interested in people's thoughts on this situation)

We, Inspire/AS17705, recently peered at AKL-IX. I was interested in using this peering exchange as much as possible so we have tended to prefer AKL-IX routes over any other peering exchange (though we still prefer bi-lats, private interconnects, etc, over AKL-IX).

Simple stuff..

We learnt a lot of routes off AKL-IX. We started sending traffic out via. AKL-IX.

Cue customer complaints.

In general, we were sending all traffic to AS4826/Vocus out via AKL-IX. I believe if another ISP had Vocus as an international provider the traffic would ingress that ISP via their international pipe. This led to one customer having packet loss over a VPN (I'd assume the far end had congested international) and another customer getting billed for this traffic as international.

We ceased learning Vocus routes from the AKL-IX. Problem solved...

Except, this doesn't really sound ideal to me. If Vocus are announcing routes to AKL-IX (their choice) I would like to be free to use them.

What should we be doing in a situation like this? What should Vocus be doing? Am I just making a mountain out of a molehill here and should I just shut-up and leave my current fix in place?

Cheers

Dave