Hi all, I expect this is probably flame bait, but I keep hitting the same question in customer-land almost every week, and wondered if there were at least a different (if not necessarily smarter) way of dealing with the problem. Maybe this is already been done to some extent, and maybe we just need to formalise some of this. Anyway ... I get endless number of customers who want to peer with more than one ISP at a time, usually with the intention of resiliency at both the institutional and upstream provider levels. So what they usually want is a Public AS number and a class C which is advertised as a long prefix to the Internet via two upstreams such as Telecom GGI and TelstraClear, often with an intermediary ISP as their direct peer. Now ... what I was thinking is ... can we do this without the rare (and increasingly difficult to obtain) Public AS numbers. Could we have a publically agreed on pool of Private AS numbers that enterprises can use to peer with service providers. The pool would administered by a "impartial" group (maybe WIX/APE). The AS number would then be stripped by both higher-order ISPs and and the IP address potentially unsuppressed by the ISP who owns the IP address aggregate. One possible hiccup I see is between NZ peers, and whether there would be a problem when for instance the TelstraClear network sees the network as one AS hop direct to the customer, and one AS hop via Telecom (and vice-versa). However, on the otherside I also wondered whether this could be used on the APE and WIX for customer to customer peering, providing more rapid peering relationship growth in NZ. Any thoughts ... or have I, in my two years of vendor-land, turned into a BGP zombie who can no longer fathom the depths of BGPs arcane and sometimes infuriating nuances ? Arron Scott *********************************************************************** Arron Scott (CCIE #4099) Phone: +64-9-3551951 Systems Engineer Mobile: +64-27-4883163 Cisco New Zealand mailto:ascott(a)cisco.com http://www.cisco.com *********************************************************************** - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog