BGP

Some Service Gateway deployments use BGP to exchange routes between the Service Gateway and the venue’s wider network — typically when the venue runs dynamic routing and doesn’t want static routes for guest subnets. The BGP tab on Service Gateway is where you configure the peering relationships.

BGP is optional. Venues with a flat guest VLAN or a simple static handoff can skip it entirely.

Peers list

Each BGP peer represents one neighbour IP address that the Service Gateway peers with. For each peer you define just the neighbour’s IP address. The autonomous-system numbers are not set per peer: the Local AS and Remote AS are single settings that apply to the BGP context as a whole (configured on the BGP common settings, with a default of 65000).

When BGP helps

• Anycast or multi-site deployments where routes need to converge based on health.
• SD-WAN integrations (Viptela / Catalyst SD-WAN) where the fabric already relies on BGP.
• Venues with their own core network team that manages routing via BGP and doesn’t want static route bookkeeping.

When to stick with static routing

• Single-site, flat-guest-VLAN venues with no redundancy requirements.
• Meraki-only venues — you don’t have a Service Gateway, so BGP isn’t applicable.
• Small deployments where the operational cost of BGP outweighs its convergence benefit.

Setting up a peer

1. Coordinate the AS values

   Agree on the Local AS and Remote AS values, which are set once on the BGP settings, and confirm which neighbour IP address to peer with. Write this down before you start.

2. Add the peer in Sign In

   From the BGP tab, click Add Peer and enter the neighbour’s IP address. The AS values are configured once on the BGP settings, not per peer.

3. Configure the router

   Mirror the peer configuration on the Cisco side. BGP on Service Gateway typically runs inside the IPsec tunnel to Netgraph.

4. Verify session is up

   The Dashboard’s BGP Service Status card flips to active once the session establishes. show bgp summary on the router confirms the session state and prefix counts.

Route advertisement

The Service Gateway advertises its connected guest subnets to the neighbour automatically. There are no admin-configurable advertise or accept policies on the Service Gateway side: route filtering is handled on the Netgraph side, not configured by you.

Related

IPsec

BGP typically runs inside the IPsec tunnel.

Gateways

Each Gateway can have BGP on or off independently.