Connect. Secure. Manage.
BGP Multihoming Design
Design Cisco BGP connectivity to multiple providers, balancing resilience, addressing arrangements and the traffic flows required during an outage.
Devices supported
across the UK
Client locations
supported
Traffic handled
at peak time
Average
response time
Average response is not a resolution time or a contractual guarantee. Support scope and response commitments are agreed for each engagement.
BGP multihoming design gives your network more than one route to the outside world. We plan how those routes should be used and what happens if a provider fails. Two circuits may still share a weak point. Our Cisco designs check those shared risks as well as traffic flow, capacity and the needs of private links.
Cisco-focused engineering
Design around the platform, traffic and failure behaviour you actually operate.
Change with evidence
Use pre-checks, acceptance criteria and a documented route back.
Operational handover
Keep the configuration, diagrams and responsibilities understandable after delivery.
Define what independence means for your business
Start with the service you cannot afford to lose. Is the priority outbound access for staff, inbound access to hosted systems, network access to a trading counterparty or several of these together? The answer changes the addressing, routing and security design. A secondary internet circuit may restore browsing while leaving an externally published service unreachable at its original address.
We investigate provider independence rather than relying on different logos on the invoices. Circuits can share an access carrier, duct, building entry or exchange. Edge routers can share a power source or upstream firewall. The design records these dependencies and distinguishes confirmed diversity from assumptions that require a supplier’s evidence.
Standards & partnerships
Confidence in the team behind your network.
Cisco Partner
Cisco Meraki
Cyber Essentials
Cyber Essentials PlusMCI Network Services is operated by Proxar Ltd. Certifications apply to the certified legal entity and the scope of its certificates. View accreditation information
Resolve addressing and advertisement rights early
The ability to advertise a prefix through multiple providers depends on the address allocation and the agreements in place. We review prefix ownership, autonomous-system arrangements, permitted advertisements and any route-registration needs with the relevant parties. We do not assume that an address range supplied with one circuit can be announced through another provider.
A business may instead use provider-specific addresses with app or translation changes during failover. That can be a valid design, but its behaviour is different from retaining one portable public prefix. We explain the trade-off in terms of service recovery and operational effort. Addressing constraints should be visible in the proposal before equipment is purchased.
A useful starting point
Not sure where to start?
Bring the requirement. We will help you define the engineering work.
Choose how much routing information to receive
Multihoming does not on its own require full internet tables. Default routes, chosen routes or a fuller route set may each be appropriate. The choice affects hardware resources, policy complexity and the degree of path choice available. We compare the customer’s real needs with the equipment’s supported capacity and the team’s ability to operate it.
Accepting more routes is not the same as achieving better resilience. A well-understood default-only design can be easier to support than a full-table rollout with poorly controlled policy. Conversely, a business that needs detailed destination preferences may justify extra routing information. The decision should be documented rather than inherited from a generic setup example.
Different environments. The same care.
Built around the work
your network supports.
Finance, banking and the wider private sector. We start with the systems and people that depend on your connections.
Finance & banking
Market-data paths, routing and provider coordination on clients’ behalf.
Financial-market services ↗Offices & multi-site teams
Reliable access between people, workplaces and business applications.
Office network design ↗Data centres & cloud
Network boundaries, workload connections and operational ownership.
Data centre networks ↗Separate inbound influence from outbound choice
Your Cisco edge can select an outbound path using local policy. Other networks decide how traffic reaches you, so inbound preferences are an influence rather than a guarantee. We review supported provider communities, announcements and other policy mechanisms before designing traffic distribution. We avoid promising an exact percentage split that cannot be maintained by the available controls.
Stateful services add another constraint. A path change can alter NAT addresses or send return traffic through a different firewall. We examine the full packet journey and define whether current sessions are expected to survive or reconnect. Our BGP traffic engineering service addresses ongoing path optimisation once the resilient foundation is established.
Test the network in its degraded state
The backup path must carry the traffic that remains after a failure. We assess circuit capacity, security-appliance throughput and routing behaviour with one provider unavailable. A design can pass a basic failover test yet become unusable when ordinary business demand reaches the smaller secondary circuit.
The test plan distinguishes local link failure, provider reachability failure and loss of an edge device. It also covers restoration: returning to the preferred path can produce another interruption. We agree safe tests, collect evidence and record scenarios that remain dependent on supplier assurances. No design is described as fully resilient merely because both neighbours were up during installation.
Prevent accidental transit and uncontrolled growth
Each provider receives only the advertisements authorised for that relationship. We clearly guard against passing routes learned from one external provider to another unless transit is genuinely part of the contract. Inbound filters and prefix limits are reviewed alongside those export controls.
The operating model includes a process for adding prefixes, replacing a circuit and changing provider policy. These activities can affect external reachability and should have reviewed change plans. We also identify who maintains route-origin authorisations and registry information. So an admin change does not unexpectedly invalidate a working announcement.
Compare the options before committing
A multihoming assessment gives you a topology, an addressing decision, a policy outline and an acceptance plan. It also identifies recurring costs and dependencies outside MCI’s control. Cisco rollout, provider coordination and ongoing support can then be scoped separately or together. Discuss your connectivity requirements with the circuit details and apps that need protection. The design should follow those needs, not a preselected router setup.
Talk to a specialist
What does your network need next?
Tell us what you are planning, changing or trying to improve. We will help define a practical next step and the engineering scope.
+44 203 196 6566Choose option 1
sales@proxar.co.ukUK-wide service.
Most of our engineers are based in Kent, with a focus on London, Sussex, Essex and Berkshire.
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