When connections to multiple providers are required it is important that Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) select the optimum route for traffic to use. The optimum, or best, route may not be what the network designer intended based on design criteria, administrative policies, or corporate mandate. Fortunately, BGP provides many tools for administrators to influence route selection. One of these tools is autonomous system (AS)-path prepending.

You can manipulate AS paths by prepending AS numbers to existing AS paths. Normally, you perform AS-path prepending on outgoing EBGP updates over the non desired return path

You can configure prepending on a router for all routing updates that you send to a neighbour or only on a subset of them.

When you are manually manipulating AS paths, the only valid AS number that you can prepend is the AS number of the sender. Prepending any other AS number will cause problems.

The longer the AS path that is announced to the EBGP neighbour on the other side of the backup link, the less likely it is that incoming traffic will be received from that neighbour.