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Protocol and Vendor agnostic yes , but people running production networks get nervous around "unsupported" (i.e. they can't call a number and get help right away). devices tied into their nets. Not saying it can't be done, but a lot of effort must be put in place to protect the Net from trouble.
What I'm saying is that the POPs would need to be run by truly competent personnel and configured to protect the Net from accidental or malicious configurations at the local gateway level.
When you start messing with routing on the Internet you HAVE to know what you are doing and trust your device not to do something stupid.
Agreed, so we need skilled operators for the regional internet gateways (RIGs) and they should be working close with or even within the organization hosting the RIGs. The hoster is also free to take any actions necessary to protect it's network by filtering and limiting the announcements from the RIG or even shutdown the BGP session completely.
All this however doesn't change the fact that the setup does not require hardware from big C or big J or whomever, a carefully selected Linux Box running some kind of routing daemons (e.g. Quagga, Bird, ExaBGP) can suffice to cope with all the tasks. Alot of projects have proven that a stable service using Linux based BGP speakers (AS112, a.ntpns.org (aka AS6647), etc) is possible.
73 de Marc, LX1DUC