upstream charges to announce new ip blocks?

[randal]

Have any of you guys ever had an upstream charge you to allow new announcements in their routing tables? A customer came online with a /21 and a couple /24s and one of our ISPs wants $400 to add it to their network, while the other three upstreams did it free of charge.

Experiences/thoughts/opinions?

 

[spidey07]

announcing the /24s is pretty bad practice, hence you wouldn't do it if there wasn't money involved.

plus adding networks to their tables takes money/memory

 

[bgroff]

Charging to add routes the tables is hoohoo... I'd be curious to hear who this ISP is, since that sounds pretty sketchy to me. Unless you are modifying your upstream filters on a daily basis that should just be normal operational expense for the service they provide you. Especially if you are peering with them via BGP...

As for advertising a /24, why should the upstream care either way what length it is? It makes to real difference to them what length it is. Its just another route in the BGP tables. Since IP address space is so tight, its fairly common for small/mid-sized operations to have a /24 delegation either from an ISP or an ARIN block for multihoming purposes. For most ISPs, it is the maximum prefix length they will accept to advertise to their peers...

 

[spidey07]

routing table space if fininte, not infinite.

ARIN, et all highly discourage advertsing anything less then a /20 in the public tables. In fact many tier1 providers have filters that block /24s. Its just a bad idea and shows lack of planning/engineering on the providers end.

 

[bgroff]

ARIN is a pain in the butt at times. Its very impractical to restrict advertisements to anything longer than /20s. Getting a delegation of that size is quite a feat. If all of the tier1s were actually blocking > 23 then very strange behaviors on the internet would be observed. What is more common is for more aggressive damping on longer prefixes. The longer the prefix, the bigger the damping penalty.

If anything, the advertisement of anything less than a /20 indicates the souce in question could not justify such a large block, however still had the need to be multihomed with more than one provider for needs of redundancy and/or load balancing.

 

[spidey07]

heh, ARIN a pain in the ass? Say it ain't so.

True, but as long as you give them what they want it ain't so bad.

But yeah, portable addresses and dual homing are the main reason to allow /24s.

 

[alrox]

Nothing wrong with announcing /24's. I'd like to know of a single provider who does block /24's. Maybe back in the day of 128mb core routers, but not now. It would lead to many inconsistency problems/complaints from customers and then you'd have to waste a network administrator's time trying to figure it out.

Take a look at AT&T's routing server(telnet route-server.ip.att.net && sh ip bgp). You'll see ton's of /24's with long AS-PATH's.

Also, yes it is BS for your upstream to charge you for additional IP announcements. The providers where I work did it for free and had it up and running withint 1 hour of an email sent to them.

I'd call and complain to the sales person at your upstream provider and threaten to cancel the service if they want to insist on the charges.

 

[err]

Yes I think there is nothing wrong with advertising /24's as well. Depending on network setup, some customers might want to bring in their own /24's that they have from long time ago. Some customers might also want to split their network and have the /24's advertised in multiple AS for BGP purposes.

My network has advertises about 6-8 /24s, some belong to customers, some belong to us and some belong to our providers.

Anyway, $400 for advertising charge seems fair. You need a qualified network engineer to sit at the other end to configure their router. Moreover, if you are doing BGP, it takes toll on their equipments.

What you should tried to do is to work on a deal with sales prior to signing on your contract to include router configuration charges.

BTW, yes ARIN is a super pain in the ass. Not a very nice organization to work together with.

err