Re: ISP operational question

["Brian W." <bri () sonicboom org>]

Comments inline.

On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, Charles Smith wrote:

> Please consider the following scenario:
>
> A new company wants to become a regional ISP. This company will purchase one 
> or two large bandwidth circuits from a NSP of their choice.
>
> Then the new regional ISP will offer private line p2p Internet service to 
> regional businesses. Basically, this is a small operation.
>
> Now here is the question. What choices does the regional ISP have when 
> implementing routing and IP addressing? I assume the regional ISP will not 
> implement BGP, since there will only be one maybe two upstream connections 
> to a single NSP - initially.
You will have a marketing problem with this.  Customers would like to see
you connected to more than 1 nsp.  Also, you sooner or later will get a
customer that wants to multihome to you and another company.  So, you'll
really need to think about getting an as and running bgp I believe. 
> Furthermore, I assume the NSP would provide the regional ISP with a supernet 
> - say a /20 or so. Then the regional ISP would allocate subnets of the 
> supernet to their customer - say /24s.
Large subnets like this may be tough to get from an nsp.  You may need to
go directly to www.arin.net for this as well, since based on the above,
you don't want your routing policy to be a reflection of 1 nsp.

> I also assume the regional ISP would not require an AS number since they are 
> not implementing BGP. Basically, all traffic from the regional ISP and 
> customers is default routed to the single upstream connection.
See above, you could avoid circuit issues by multihoming to this 1 nsp,
but what if they have a routing problem??

> Are these assumptions valid? Is this a good configuration? I realize 
> multiple upstreams from different providers is optimal, however not 
> plausdable in this case.
>
> Your constructive insight to the scenario is appreciated.
>
> Chas
> _____________________________________________________________________________________
> Get more from the Web.  FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com