RE: Best way to supply colo customer with specific provider

["Randal Kohutek" <nanog () data102 com>]

We had that same problem and ended up doing it exactly as below, with
limited BGP announcements and policy routing all over. The customer also
demanded high-bandwidth at low cost, without regard to how good the actual
bandwidth was. It was, as you say, graceless. 

Luckily we convinced them to purchase standard multi-carrier transit. I hope
you can do the same :)

Cheers,
Randal Kohutek
 
> Hello all,
>
> Being relatively new to the colocation business, we run into 
> a fair number of issues that we've never run into before.  
> Got a new one today, and although I can think of kludgey ways 
> to accomplish what he wants, I'd rather get some other ideas first...
>
> We just had our first customer that's requesting bandwidth 
> exclusively through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at 
> less expensive pricing.  
> The money people here are up for it, but obviously, they want 
> to make sure that he's confined to that Cogent connection.
>
> So now of course we're attempting to figure out the best way 
> to do this, and I figured that rather than reinventing the 
> wheel, I'd check to see how others accomplish things like this.
>
> The way I can imagine doing it is by using route-maps to 
> steer all of this customer's traffic out the Cogent pipe, and 
> modifying our BGP announcements by AS prepending on whatever 
> block or blocks we set aside to be "Cogent-exclusive".
>
> Again though, this seems to me to lack a certain amount of, 
> for lack of a better word, "grace".
>
> Any other suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rick Kunkel