RE: Multi-homed implementation and BGP convergence time

["Holmes,David A" <dholmes () mwdh2o com>]

The time should be measured in seconds for your BGP advertised prefixes
to propagate to most of the Internet. It may take longer for some
isolated ISP's to receive the routes. If you use the longest prefix
method to advertise to your preferred ISP, a convergence to the backup
ISP (where shorter prefixes are advertised) may take 30 seconds or so
max. Converging back to the preferred ISP should take a few seconds max.


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew.Claybaugh () securian com
[mailto:Andrew.Claybaugh () securian com] 
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 1:55 PM
To: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Multi-homed implementation and BGP convergence time


Hello - my company currently has two connections with a single tier 1
ISP.
We are using the AS from our ISP at this time.  In the next month we
will
be implementing a third connection with a second tier 1 ISP, so we will
now
be using our own AS number on all three routers.  My question is when we
implement the new connection and update our existing connections to use
are
own AS number, how much downtime will there be?  So far the second ISP
has
only said that it could be hours for BGP to fully converge.  We are
looking
for more detail about how long the outage will be and how widespread.

Will it be relatively short to our customers that are on one of the ISPs
we
are directly connected to?  Is downtime less for customers on other tier
1
ISPs versus tier 2, etc. ISPs?

We will only be receiving a default route on each of the three
connections.
Our routers will be advertising a small number of routes - 6 to 8.

Thank you.

Andy Claybaugh