Re: Changing ISP?

[David Gillett <gillettdavid () FHDA EDU>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Kaftan [mailto:jkaftan () UTICA EDU]

> 1.    Should we leave MCI and suffer the pain of changing ISPs and
> receiving a new set of Public IPs?

  Do the benefits *to you* outweigh the pain and expense?  Others
can try to help you identify the benefits and costs, but the
decision has to reflect the importance of each of those in your
particular case.

> 2.    Can anyone else relate their recent experiences with
> MCI positive or negative?

  It's 5-6 years now since I had any dealings with them, but at
that time:
  - we had multiple MCI subsidiaries/divisions bidding competitively
    against each other
  - we had an incident where one of their internal security groups
    aggressively scanned one of our subnets, allegedly believing they
    were scanning machines internal to MCI
  - we ultimately dealt only with the part of MCI that had formerly
    been UUNET, and at that point still had a clue

> 3.    Also, is it sufficient to use a single ISP for redundancy if
> they give us separate local loops, via separate ILECs, into opposite
> ends of the campus, to separate COs?

  Again, it's your judgement.  Redundancy is a measure taken to
mitigate risks of certain kinds of failure.  In this case, you'd be
mitigating only a (fairly large) subset of the risks, but saving
yourself expense and effort.  You could judge that to be a reasonable
trade-off.

> 4.    Can anyone speak to setting up redundancy with separate ISPs and
> BGP?

  This isn't something you can do without the active cooperation of
the ISPs, and probably actual help from at least one of them.
  What we wound up doing with UUNET looked a lot like #3, talking BGP
to their network but, because they were our only provider, using iBGP
within their AS number rather than having to obtain our own.  Actually,
here we've got our own AS number and talk eBGP to our ISP through
multiple gateways as #3.
  So that suggests that #3 above is a good starting point, especially
if the ISP is willing to set up iBGP with you.  At some point down the
road, you can decide to take the additional step of getting your own
net block and AS number and converting from iBGP to eBGP, which would
lay the groundwork for, at some even further future date, bringing in
connectivity from additional ISP(s), as benefits are seen to outweigh
costs.
  So the immediate question is:  If you go with multiple connections to
the same ISP per #3, do you stay with MCI to do it?

> We have not talked about cost with any ISPs but I imagine it
> would be much more affordable using a single ISP.     
>
> We are planning owning our next set of IP addresses.  I'm
> told there might be a chance that we could keep our current
> set.  We'll see.

  Odds are that your current set lie within a block allocated to the
current ISP.  They might or might not lie on a convenient boundary
for them to relinquish them to you.

David Gillett
CISSP CCNP