ISP support for use of 4-byte ASNs in peering

Folks -

  Is there a public list somewhere of service providers that do not support 4-byte
  autonomous system numbers when peering? (if not, should there be one?)

  At ARIN, we are still having parties returning 4-byte ASN's (seeking 2-byte instead),
  indicating that the 4-byte ones are not sufficiently accepted in peering to be usable.
  This is obviously a less than desirable situation, and it appears that it is not trending
  towards resolution at this time.

Thoughts?
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN

  At ARIN, we are still having parties returning 4-byte ASN's (seeking 2-byte instead),
  indicating that the 4-byte ones are not sufficiently accepted in peering to be usable.
  This is obviously a less than desirable situation, and it appears that it is not trending
  towards resolution at this time.

At INEX, we see 60% of IXP connections which can handle ASN32 natively.
However, INEX is a small IXP and I haven't seen similar figures from other
IXPs which could validate this 60/40 split.

Having said that, in the IXP world most new service providers connect into
route servers, so there is often no perceived requirement for direct
ASN32->ASN16 interconnection - the intersection of new service providers
and ASN32 holders is quite large. And if you really want a bilateral
peering relationship, there's no reason not to use AS23456.

Thoughts?

- interior BGP community management is great fun with an ASN32, oh yes.

- i don't have much sympathy for people who whine about not being able to
support ASN32 peerings. There is no good reason for this these days.

- from personal experience, I understand why ASN32 is less popular.
However, it's certainly usable.

Nick

While attempting to focus on ISPs there is still [unbelievably] a vendor support issue. You may consider this a procurement failure, but the fact remains that some products [Cisco me3400e] have yet to implement support.

-Michael

the me3400 is a metro core ethernet switch with L3 extensions. It's not
intended as a border router. If you use the wrong tool for the job...

Nick

Aren't there still community issues with 4 byte ASN space as well that have
not been resolved?

-Blake

I think I mentioned that.

draft-raszuk-wide-bgp-communities will fix this, but it's unclear when
we'll start seeing this rolled out in production code.

Nick

Granted I've never worked outside academia but the me3400 is otherwise a cost effective gig-e demarc for very simple bgp multihoming.

They have made a strategic decision to not implement a simple software update support RFC4893 [it has been 4 years] and to set an artificial price point on entry. Fine, that is their choice. There are other vendors offering 4 byte ASN in simliar products at or near this price point and we'll probably have to move to them.

-Michael

John Curran wrote:

Folks -
   Is there a public list somewhere of service providers that do not support 4-byte autonomous system numbers when peering? (if not, should there be one?)

  At ARIN, we are still having parties returning 4-byte ASN's (seeking 2-byte instead),
  indicating that the 4-byte ones are not sufficiently accepted in peering to be usable. This is obviously a less than desirable situation, and it appears that it is not trending towards resolution at this time.

Perhaps you meant to send this to c-nsp and re-worded it slightly?

- Kevin