> I spoke to a sprint salesperson about 2 weeks ago and was told that I
> could not get any kind of BGP4 peering with Sprint unless I had a
> Cisco 7000 series router.
That brings up an interesting question. I've been told now that I can
in fact connect to Sprint, but am I going to be able to do BGP4 peering?
The connection would be pretty worthless without that, as I have several
networks I need to announce, and expect to get a full routing table back
from Sprint. What is Sprint's official policy on this?
This is my experience also, althought I was able to get my sales
weasel to say that they might except a 45xx series if it had
sufficient memory, as some "exceptions" had been granted on a "case
by case" basis.As a reseller of IP services they will not manage my router for me,
but said I still had to have a Cisco(tm) router, even if I'm not
peering BGP.
I won't say there's "no way they can know", but basically they really
shouldn't. If you disable incoming telnet to your Bay box and tell
them it's a cisco with "cdp disabled", they shouldn't be able to
tell the difference.
I considered that, actually. 
Of course, you'd best know how the hell to configure the bay box
if you want to go this route.
That goes without saying. If I didn't know how to configure it, I'd go
buy a 2500 and let someone else manage it for me, like many other ISPs do.
As it is, I'm quite familiar with how my routers work, and what their
capabilities are. I wish other people were.. I'm always surprised when
engineers from MCI tell me "Oh, Bay Networks can't do BGP4" (ignoring the
fact that I *am* doing it with them.) I have two Bay BCN routers here,
each card in the router has a 60MHz processor and 64MB of memory. One
processor card is designated as the BGP soloist, and *all* it does is
process BGP. If I want one, I can get a processor card that has dual
PPC chips on it that will run as a BGP soloist. If anyone thinks Bay
can't do BGP4, I'd be happy to give them a tour.