[BBLISA] need a BGP tunnel peer (was Re: comcast ... again)

[Alex Aminoff]

On 10/30/2010 5:15 PM, Robert Keyes wrote:
>
> I have an ASN, a server running BGPd and announcing to/from my ISP. I 
> could peer with you over a VPN. If there's a low-demand situation, it 
> can be set up gratis, but higher demands may require some money. I 
> eventually plan on selling a service such as this, where I can give 
> customers 'real' IPs from my assignments, or route their own IP space 
> for them. Right now, I don't have the automated scripts set up to make 
> everything nice and slick, so an alpha-test user or two, who would 
> have minimal demands and minimal expectations, would get service for 
> free.
>
> If this sounds like something you're interested in, we can discuss it. 
> I'd be interested in knowing how much interest there is for this 
> service, and people's ideas on how it should be managed, priced, and 
> policed.
>
> My idea for pricing is a per-GB transfer, plus a per-IP address/month 
> charge, on top of a low base rate to cover the cost of running the 
> service. I am toying with the idea of offering prepaid 'bandwidth 
> cards'. Policing spammers would be a hassle, but spammers can be 
> dissuaded by charging a higher rate for outbound port 25 traffic than 
> for other ports.

BaseSpace already has a /24, assigned from Cogent, and an ASN. Your 
solution would be a possibility, though if your pricing is per GB that 
might not work well for us since current traffic is in the 100s of 
GB/month and one reason for doing this is so that we could take 
advantage of the big FIOS pipe to potentially use much more. You can see 
BaseSpace's traffic here: http://www.basespace.net/mrtg/

On 11/1/2010 1:22 AM, Dean Anderson wrote:

> Tunneling to another ISP isn't going to be very efficient.  You are down
> if they are down, or if anything in between you and them is down; then
> you have ordinary problems if anything in between them and the client is
> down. (that was severe enough to motivate the search for multihoming)
>
> BGP flapping can make things worse on both connections.
>
> Why not just get a /24 from VZ and dual home your DNS, mail, etc servers
> to different IP addresses?  Seems easier.
>
We don't want to ask our customers to do that. BaseSpace is an ISP 
(although a small one) - part of what we do is hide the complexity of 
routing etc from our customers. We need to be able to give them one IP 
address and have it just work and be up most of the time.

Re: BGP flapping, at least initially the tunnelled link will be mostly 
the backup, and the T1 with Cogent has been pretty solid. Longer-term, 
if we grow, we may need to worry about this, but at that point maybe we 
will be able to afford a better solution. It's a problem we would like 
to have :)

OTOH, we do have some customers with large bandwidth needs but at least 
potentially not high uptime requirements. We could get a big assignment 
from VZ and give those customers those IPs, and either ask them to use 
those for their less-critical traffic, or set up some sort of policy 
routing on our router for them.


Thanks to everyone for all the helpful suggestions.

  - Alex