Does using BGP make it easier to change provider?
Each national backbone provider has its own procedures to handle customers that wish to use BGP. These procedures may be easier than the procedures used for customers using static routing but generally each will require some sort of route registration and so there is probably no real saving in effort. However if you are using BGP to more than one provider you can migrate routes between the providers without their intervention (assuming any route registration has already been performed). In order to migrate the routes you should start announcing the routes to the new provider and confirm that the new path is visible via a “looking glass”. You may need to prepend your AS on the old path to make that path “longer”. Having confirmed that the new provider is successfully announcing the routes you can then terminate the announcement to the old provider.
