Commercial Peering Service (CPS): FAQ

Who can connect?

Any Internet2 Connector can connect to the Commercial Peering Service. Additionally, Connectors can advertise any of their customer prefixes to the service, including prefixes that cannot routed on the Internet2 IP Network.

It's important to note that Connectors cannot route to each other through the Commercial Peering Service. Connectors can only route to the peer networks through this service. Connector to Connector connectivity must go through the regular Internet2 IP Network.

How do I get connected?

It is easy for Internet2 Connectors to get connected to the Commercial Peering Service (CPS). Simply call or email the Internet2 NOC and let them know you'd like to get connected to CPS. An engineer will contact you to go over the steps to get connected and answer any questions you may have.

The engineer will ask you some questions about how your Commodity Internet (CI) connections are currently configured and how much CI bandwidth you currently use. They will verify that your existing Internet2 connection can sustain your current Internet2 traffic loads, the anticipated traffic loads of your CI bandwidth and any unused "overhead" bandwidth you'd like to maintain on your link.

If you do not already have 802.1q VLAN encapsulation (or Frame-Relay encapsulation) enabled on your connection, the engineer will schedule a time to add this to your link.

Once that's done, they will work with you to configure a second VLAN (or DLCI) and BGP session for CPS and schedule a time to turn-up the service.

You will need to provide the NOC with a list of BGP ASN's (or a reference to an IRR AS-SET Object ) that you will be advertising to the Peering Service.

What ASN does CPS use?

Internet2 CPS uses the same Autonomous System number as the Internet2 IP network (AS11537) even though it is a completely separate routing domain.

Internet2 CPS is currently deployed as an MPLS Layer-3 VPN (aka VRF) on all of the Internet2 T640 routers. This provides complete separation of routing from the Internet2 IP network (formerly known as Abilene).

MPLS Layer-3 VPNs were chosen because they are standards-based and well-proven as well as simple and easy to deploy. Using Juniper's Logical Routers features for the routing separation would have allowed the use of a different ASN, but there are currently software limitations (specifically the lack of Netflow data when using LRs) that prevented the use of this feature. This choice will be evaluated again if/when Netflow is supported within Logical Routers.

Can I be selective about which peers to exchange traffic with?

Yes, absolutely. Internet2 has implemented a set of BGP communities that, along with your own local BGP import policy, will allow you to control your traffic path to/from the Internet2 CPS peer networks.

If you do not want CPS peer network X to send traffic to you over Internet2 CPS, you can tag your prefixes with the BGP Community 65000:ABC where "ABC" is the BGP ASN of peer network X. If your BGP import policy is also set to reject Internet2's advertisements of routes from ASN "ABC", you will not send traffic to network X over Internet2 CPS either.

If you want traffic to/from peer network Y to be preferred through a different path, but want to use the Internet2 CPS path as a backup, you can tag your prefixes with 65001:XYZ, 65002:XYZ, or 65003:XYZ where "XYZ" is the BGP ASN of network Y. These communities will cause Internet2 to pad the AS-PATH towards peer network Y 1, 2 or 3 times respectively (using AS11537 for the pad).

All of these communities are specific to individual peer networks and do not affect routing to/from the other peer networks.

Which Internet2 Connectors are participating?

The current participating Connectors are:

* Northern Crossroads (NOX)
* Indiana GigaPoP
* Oregon GigaPoP
* OARnet
* Great Plains Network (GPN)
* CIC (Iowa, UIUC, WiscNet)
* University of New Mexico
* LONI (Louisiana Optical Networking Initiative)
* MERIT
* MREN
* University of South Florida (USF)
* MAGPI
* Northern Lights Gigapop (UMN)
* Utah Education Network (UEN)
* University of Memphis
* Kentucky Regional Optical Network (KyRON)
* Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX)
* North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN)