A few years ago, the traditional wisdom was that you could not do load balancing in networks using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as their core routing protocol. The technology, actually its implementation in Cisco IOS, has evolved since then, resulting in a number of load balancing options for BGP-based networks. However, even though it is possible to load-balance in BGP networks, it is still not as easy as Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP; for example OSPF or EIGRP)-based load balancing, which happens automatically. In this IP Corner article, Ivan Pepelnjak describes load-balancing options available with BGP.