Why should a multi-homed organisation use BGP?
The single word answer is “control”. When you decided to multi-home it was for a reason, maybe extra capacity, redundancy, or tariffing, so in order to actually perform any of these functions you need to control how your networks are announced to your providers. If you don’t exchange routes with them but rely on them announcing your routes you could find your traffic flowing down an expensive low capacity link with the other cheaper, higher capacity links mostly idle! Using BGP also means configuring it on your router and announcing routing information with it. We don’t remove static routing for networks until we see them reliably announced via BGP.
Related Questions
- Rateable Value Q: A premises has 50% of their rateable value waived as a charitable organisation. How should the applicant calculate the rateable value of the premises for conversion purposes?
- My organisation is/was multi-homed but our aut-num and route objects were maintained by an ISP that is no longer operating. Can you change the objects for us?
- Why should a multi-homed organisation use BGP?