BGP Timers

[bill.greenwood]

I am looking for recommendations on lowering the BGP Hello and Hold timers to speed failover in the event of a failure.  The default timers are 60 (hello) and 180 (hold timer), which are way too long.  The carriers recommendation is to lower these to 30 and 90, but Carriers tend to be very conservative in what they implement.  90 seconds is still a long time especially on a network where the WAN bandwidth is 50M, 100M, or 200M depending on the site.  I believe lowering to 10 and 30 (or 5 and 15) would be feasible in this environment.  This is for a MPLS network with dual carriers with 20+ sites and high bandwidth.  Does anyone have any real world experience they could share or thoughts?

Thanks,

Bill

[Jon Marshall]

Bill

We have used 10 30 on an MPLS network in the UK peering with BT (British Telecom) routers. It worked fine for us. Be aware that the timers do not need to match to form a BGP neighborship, the lower of the proposed timers will be used, but best make it clear to your SP that this is what you are going to do.

Jon