6. Speculation

1) If provider A and provider B have a large presence in a geographical area (or other routing domain), and many customers are multi-homed between them, it makes sense for all of those customers to be placed within the same AS. However, it is noted that case should only be looked at if practical to do so and fully coordinated between customers and service providers involved.

2) Sites should not be forced to place themselves in a separate AS just so that someone else (externally) can make AS-based policy decisions. Nevertheless, it may occasionally be necessary to split up an AS or a prefix into two ASes for policy reasons. Those making external policy may request the network operators make such AS changes, but the final decision is up to those network operators who manage the prefixes in question, as well as the ASes containing them. This is, of course, a trade off -- it will not always be possible to implement all desired routing policies.