Expanding Lumen’s Internet Load Balancing Capabilities with BGP ADD-PATH

Responsible for managing one of the biggest internet backbones on the planet, Lumen’s IP network architects and engineers are busy people. They spend a lot of time researching, thinking, planning, testing, deploying, and monitoring changes to our global internet backbone network in order to optimize its performance. One such change is occurring after many months of work – we are extremely excited to announce that we have enabled BGP ADD-PATH (RFC7911) within our AS3356 global internet backbone.

The ADD-PATH feature is a BGP extension that allows Lumen Provider Edge (PE) and Route-Reflector (RR) routers to advertise multiple paths to the same IP prefix without the new paths implicitly replacing any previous paths. The extension enables Lumen and its customers the ability to achieve load-sharing and resiliency when homed to more than one PE in the same gateway. The Lumen implementation of this feature will allow BGP speakers within AS3356 to advertise and receive up to two paths for injection.

If you have questions about whether this change will impact your network, please review the BGP ADD-PATH Guide on our Internet Access page.