Route advertisement requests made by a customer are received at route provisioning center (20) to effect either advertisement of a newly provisioned route or withdrawal of an existing route. In the case of a request to advertise a newly provisioned route, the request is subjected to validation, and if unable to be validated, the request is rejected. Upon validation of a new route advertisement, or following receipt of a request to withdraw an existing route advertisement, the customer-entered request is entered into an official routing database (26) for subsequent propagation to network access providers (14, 16 and 18). Periodically, a check is made to verify that the customer-entered request remains active.