I'm connected to 3 ISP's right now. Two of them already have routers at my site, the third one announced me "they need to install some equipment" when I requested BGP session. I can only assume they need to install a Router, since that connection is now working fine, using the usual /30 net block for the connection, and the "last-mile" solution is not going to change since they only installed it last week and the BGP was in the contract from the beginning.
I simply don't understand this: the "feed" is already a form of ethernet. Even those they're using different technologies for the last mile, they're all entering the ISP router using an RJ45 WAN port. I assume the ISP router does something really important that can't be done by the Big Router on the other end of the connection. It must also be something that can hurt them if miss-configured, since they don't trust us (the client) to do the stuff on our router. And I'm not talking cheap throw-away routers here: One of the routers is Cisco 2800.
Edit to add network details:
I'm connected to 3 ISP's, two over Radio links, one over Fiber Optic. One of the radio links is going to get dropped and the other radio link will be turned into fiber sometime next year. The fiber is 20 Mbit, radio 1 is 40 Mbit and radio 2 is 2 Mbit. I've got a /24 of provider independent address space. I'm not doing out-of-the ordinary stuff with my network, I'm overly connected because my network needs to be "up" all the time.
