BGP Community support for IPX/GRX services for AS6762/AS64518 Customers

Seabone makes use of some set of communities to help our customers to better tune their traffic without requiring a manual intervention from us.

Communities accepted from customers

All customers are allowed to send the following communities:

Customer-controllable selective announce

This community string implementation is used to permit our customers to control their announcements towards the largest peerings.

The format is 6762:40pXX where the fields are coded in the following way:

p if 0 do not announce this prefix to XX, if 1,2 or 3 prepend network 1, 2 or 3 times to XX
XX defines the network you don't want to send this route to, according to the following table:

01	AS28834	Telekom Austria
02	AS35030	Comfone
03	AS64515	Cable&Wireless
04	AS15932	Telenor
05	AS22870	Syniverse
06	AS64513	Teliasonera
07	AS19440	Aicent
08	AS6774	Belgacom
09	AS8657	Marconi
10	AS20936	T-System
11	AS3292	Teledanmark
12	AS12956	Telefonica
13	AS2300	France Telecom
14	AS4637	Reach
15	AS64527	MTT
16	AS1257	Swipnet
17	AS12713	Ote Globe
18	AS8959	Etisalat
19	AS38645	NTT-Com
20	AS8657	Portugal Telecom
21	AS43225	KPN-Ibasis
22	AS209	Qwest
23	AS4755	TATA

 

Controlling announcements to IXPs

The same scheme above is now extended so as to permit the customers to do selective announcements to the public peering points to which Seabone is connected.

The format is 6762:400XX where the fields are coded in the following way
XX defines the IXP you don't want to send this route to, according to the following table:

99	AMSIX
98	Equinix Singapore

The standard local preferences on Seabone are defined as 100 for customer Routes and 90 for peering routes.
A local preference of 50 is used for backup routes, such as when confining a route in a region.
This prevents the creation of blackholes in case a better route to destination is not learnt in other regions for any reason.
Customer can modify the local preference for their routes by sending a community 6762:1xxx. The following table shows the available values:

6762:1090	Set local preference to 90 (same as peering)
6762:1070	Set local preference to 70 (lower than peering)
6762:1050	Set local preference to 50 (backup route)

This scheme works only for peers that Seabone reaches over the public switch fabric. It is not implemented for private peers even if they are on the same router, nor for peers with a hybrid setup (private and public).

Communities sent to customers

All customers will receive at least one of these communities. These communities will help you to choose the routes that you receive from Seabone, if you have the need to route only to a particular area, or if you want to treat your link as a peering link.

6762:30	Route learnt in Europe
6762:31	Route learnt in North-America
6762:32	Route learnt in South-America
6762:33	Route learnt in Asia
6762:34	Route learnt in Africa
6762:60	Route learnt from a customer

The distinction on geographic area is based on where the route entered Seabone's network. This means that you should not be surprised of seeing, for example, a South American customer tagged as North American.