Most of what goes wrong with a carrier is settled, or not settled, before the circuit is ordered. The contract covers price and term. It rarely covers the things that matter at two in the morning.

When you select a provider, their policies become your policies. That was true when we first wrote it on this site and it is still true. So before the order goes in, we work through the questions the sales process skips.

Which communities will they honor for you? Every large carrier publishes a set of BGP communities their customers can set: lower the preference of a route, stop announcing it to a particular peer, prepend toward one region, blackhole a prefix under attack. Some publish the list openly. Some hand it over on request. A few do not have one worth the name. We ask for the list before signing, read it against what your network will need, and keep a copy. Our community guides exist because customers kept asking us for exactly this.

How do they announce maintenance? A notice that arrives by email, in a format that changes every quarter, to a mailbox nobody reads at night, is not a notice. We ask how the carrier sends maintenance windows, how far ahead, and whether there is a way to receive them that your own systems can act on. Then we set that up on your side so the alarm at 01:40 is matched to the window announced last Tuesday.

What does the hand-off look like on paper? The demarcation point, the circuit identifiers, the interface settings, the IP assignments on the link, the AS numbers on both ends, the prefix lists each side will accept. If this is not written down on the day the circuit turns up, it is reconstructed during the first outage. We write it down on the day.

Who do you call, and what do they need from you? The number, the hours, the account identifiers they will ask for, and what counts as an emergency in their process. We have watched too many outages run long because the first twenty minutes went to finding the right ticket queue.

What happens when you add a second carrier? The questions above get asked again, and a new one appears: how the two interact. Which one carries your announcements to which peers, how traffic returns when one path is withdrawn, and whether both circuits really take different paths into your building. A second provider on the same fiber is not a second provider.

None of this is complicated. It is work that has to be done once, carefully, and kept current. We have been doing it for operators and enterprises since 2003, and the guides on this site are one result of it.

If you are about to order a circuit, or you already have one and have never seen the provider’s community list, talk with us.