DataXchange connected to MAE-EAST about 60 days ago. When you are are connected, you must contact each participant to solicit a peering relationship. When attempting to arrange a peering relationship, you have a number of different reactions to your request. Often, the technical staff that deal with these decisions are just too busy to deal with this.
Currently DataXchange is peering with about 1/2 of the providers at MAE-EAST. Most are informal. Some require agreements, but only a few. Robert believes that it is too much effort to get each of these agreements.
Robert comments that there already exists MPLA at Ameritech and PAC*BELL and perhaps that work should be made universal. Robert would like to see the the RA to remove the RA AS number from the path and have the updates take place faster. He also suggested that folks analyize their routing policy and make it help make possible more global reachability.
Someone from the RA says that AS transparency is already an option. Peter argues that editing the AS path is bad because it make BGP loop detection problematical. Robert agrees to remove that from his list. Guy Almes argues that this is not really a function of BGP, but a function of the route selection algorithm of the router of choice.