Advice on dealing with Sprint

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1

OK, Cisco bigots (hi Craig!), quit laughing at me for a second and give me
some help here. Is there any technical justification for what Sprint is
telling me? I have downstream customers using Bay, Cisco, HP, 3com,
Compatible Systems, and even Proteon routers. All of them are able to
connect with me just fine. I've been running BGP4 peering with MCI for
over a year now, it also works fine. I can't find a single valid reason
that Sprint should even need to "approve" my router vendor, except that
some short-sighted engineer at Sprint doesn't understand that we live in
a multi-vendor world. I'm obviously not going to force Sprint to accept
my money, but this screws up a lot of the plans we have made in building
our network.

Simple really. Sprint have a back-door deal with Cisco, either
for money or favours (like getting bugs fixed :slight_smile: that means that
they will only allow Cisco boxes to connect.

Remeber kids, most of the scaling problems on the internet today
are because people insist that Cisco boxes are the highest common
denominator. Not the lowest, as they really are.

Regards,

2

Simple really. Sprint have a back-door deal with Cisco, either
for money or favours (like getting bugs fixed :slight_smile: that means that
they will only allow Cisco boxes to connect.

First, careful readers of this forum would have noticed that the head of
SL Ops said right here that the restriction is non-op.

Second, the reasons suppliers of service (in general, not just internet)
ask customers to standardize on CPE is that experience has taught us that
in 99% of the cases we are going to be dealing with the CPE. "Against our
wills, Papa! Against our wills!"

The solution I recommend is for the provider to charge T&M for dealing
with CPE which they do not supply. When presented with the real costs,
consumers tend toward wiser decisions.

randy