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IP transit provider charging monthly fee per BGP prefix announcement
juniorrrrr
Member
Hi everyone,
I would like to ask if anyone has seen this before with an IP transit provider.
We have an IP transit service with an eBGP session. The prefixes are originated from our own ASN, through our own router. The provider is only acting as our upstream / next-hop.
None of the prefixes are owned, leased, or provided by the transit provider. They are either our own prefixes or prefixes properly authorized to be originated by our ASN/Router.
However, we noticed that the provider has been charging us monthly fees for each announced /24, under items such as:
“IP addresses pool announcement”
“Subnet rental”
The charge is around USD 10/month per /24. We have been billed for several months.
From my understanding, if we are already paying for IP transit with BGP, announcing authorized customer prefixes should be part of the transit service. I would expect charges for the port, commit, bandwidth, 95th percentile, cross-connect, etc., but not a recurring monthly fee per externally-owned prefix announced over the BGP session.
To be clear:
The provider does not own these IP blocks.
We are not renting these subnets from them.
The prefixes are announced from our ASN and router
The provider is only the upstream / next-hop.
The BGP session is part of the IP transit service.
Has anyone here ever seen this kind of billing before?
Is it common for an IP transit provider to charge a monthly fee per customer-owned/customer-authorized BGP prefix announcement?
We are already disputing the charges and asking for removal from future invoices, plus a refund or account credit for the previous months.
I would appreciate feedback from other providers or network operators.
Comments
No it's not common. Nothing but a greediness.
Today's hardware routers able to handle millons of routes. So.. you know what I mean.
Have you recommended this pay-per-prefix approach to Cogent yet? They may be interested.
There are also large T2 carriers that charge by prefix if traffic is to be routed through DDoS protection - I believe Datapacket/CDN77 also charges a one-time fee for prefix activation, plus an expedited fee if applicable. Generally speaking, however, with a BGP session, you normally don’t have to pay anything extra for additional prefixes.
Check your contract.
If you are unhappy, terminate the contract and walk away.
next week they add a venue surcharge
I checked it. There is nothing in the contract about a recurring per-prefix fee or “subnet rental” for prefixes not owned by them.
The BGP setup was agreed by email, and the only fee mentioned was a fixed USD 10/month BGP service/session fee.
10$ for /24 where?!
I'll pay $12 for an /8.
How big is your commit? Is it a tier1?
Is it a filtering / anti ddos filtering service?
Not a Tier 1.
It is the company that provides our colocation and also provides us IP transit. We have some colocated servers with them, plus a BGP session and 1Gbps transit commit.
No special DDoS filtering or anti-DDoS service is included here, just regular IP transit.
Hi,
if its not contracted, then dont pay it.
If they insist, decide if you want to fight, in worst case at court ( if this company is located in a country that cares about law stuff like this ).
This kind of stuff happens usually if you are making deals with non serious entities who do not plan to stay long time in market.
Especially happens if you pay close to nothing for connected services. Somewhere the money has to come from ....
In general:
If a contract partner would charge me a fee that was not agreed, and will not easily remove it after a friendly hint from my side, then you will know this is not the right partner to grow with.