After 8 years of having Sprint as part of our AS transit mix we will be removing our circuits to AS1239 on February 4th, 2013. While it’s been our most reliable, outlasting other providers that have come and gone, it’s far too overpriced for us to seriously consider keeping it. In its place we have recently turned up BGP with Charter Communications and have another Ethernet circuit from AT&T pending turn up (additional equipment was recently placed in AT&T’s fiber bay in our telco room). We’ve chosen to add these two providers to our local mix for not only cost savings, but because these providers are also large players in our region. Having direct connections to them will allow us to keep more traffic in region for our local customer base. Both also support native IPv6 and meet our transit provider parity mandates.
Effective today, January 18, 2013, we have lowered the local preference in our AS below transit default for all routes received from AS1239 and are tagging our announcements with the lowest supported local preference community. These actions will divert almost all traffic transiting through Sprint in favor of others. In two weeks we will administratively disable all BGP neighbors with AS1239 and remove the physical circuits.
We do not anticipate any impact by removing Sprint, although you may notice new hops in traceroutes. Making these changes to our routing policy ahead of time allow us to make such a transition without impact, and is a perfect example of how being autonomous allows us to add and remove providers at will. We do not make such decisions based on price alone and frequently pay reasonable premiums for critical services, the pricing associated with Sprint was over four times as expensive as the nearest alternative with no upgrade path through Sprint.
As always, we appreciate the support of our customers and look forward to serving you in 2013 and beyond.