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Network Dictionary – BGP Speaker

23rd October 2010 by 1 Comment

Why do networking people use the term “BGP Speaker” instead of “BGP Router” ? The simple reason is that in many networks there are other devices that do not route traffic at all, but exist to gather information on the BGP data. For example, Route Servers that exist to only act as Route Reflectors for all routers in the network do not pass customer data at all. That is, their data plane is unused except to transport BGP packets into the network.

Note for other routing protocols we use the terminology “OSPF Router” or “RIP Router” quite freely and it’s only BGP that has this “speaker” concept.

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About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

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  • http://alouche.net Ali Abbas

    > and itís only BGP that has this ìspeakerî concept.

    I would not be so radical and say “BGP is the only one”…

    OSPF can participate in a topology without forwarding traffic by clearing the R-bit… this makes it “an OSPF Speaker”. Having said that, all routers talking a protocol are “Speakers” of this protocol.

    After all, a speaker is linguistically someone who is able to speak a language, whether it is French, English, BGP or OPSF