Informational BGP communities

Route origin

The route server will mark all routes with certain BGP Communities to indicate their origin. You can use this information to determine where a certain route has been injected into the DE-CIX switching platform. This gives you the option to filter routes learned from the route servers based on geographical location. 

Currently we mark the following information:

Switch: Indicates at which switch a route has been injected into the DE-CIX platform. We tag the corresponding edge switch of the port.

• Example: edge03.fra12

Metro: The metropolitan region corresponding to the switch.

• Example: Frankfurt

Country: The country corresponding to the above (UN M49 format).

• Example: Germany

Continent: The continent corresponding to the above (UN M49 format).

• Example: Europe

This means that every route you will learn from the route servers will have four (additional) BGP Communities (per community class, e.g. each Standard and Large respectively) attached which indicate location information.

To avoid ambiguity about the semantics of a certain BGP Community, especially when being present multiple times, we strip all BGP Communities from the range that we use for route origin tagging on import. This is:

• Standard Communities
  • 65101:*
  • 65102:*
  • 65103:*
  • 65104:*
     
• Large Communities
  • <RS ASN>:1911:*
  • <RS ASN>:1912:*
  • <RS ASN>:1913:*
  • <RS ASN>:1914:*

where <RS ASN> is the corresponding route server ASN at a given IXP.

Overview

Please note: If the exact location of a customer cannot be determined from the DE-CIX database, or in certain special cases, we mark these routes with 6510{1-4}:65535 and <RS ASN>:191{1-4}:65535, meaning "unknown".

Examples

Example 1

A route has the following BGP Communities attached to it:

• 6695:1914:150
• 6695:1913:276
• 6695:1912:1
• 6695:1911:96

From these BGP Communities you can deduce that this particular route has been injected in Europe (6695:1914:150), Germany (6695:1913:276) in metro region Munich (6695:1912:1) at edge02.muc1 (6695:1911:96) at GlobePEER Frankfurt (ASN 6695).

Example 2

A route has the following BGP Communities attached to it:

• 65104:142
• 65103:702
• 65102:18000
• 65101:18113

From these BGP Communities you can deduce that this particular route has been injected in Asia (65104:142), Republic of Singapore (65103:702) in metro region Singapore (65102:18000) at edge01.sin1 (65101:18113).

Example 3

A route has the following BGP Communities attached to it:

• 65104:019
• 400330:1913:840
• 65102:2000
• 400330:1911:127

From these BGP Communities you can deduce that this particular route has been injected in Americas (65104:19), USA (400330:1913:840) in metro region New York City (65102:2000) at edge02.nyc1 (400330:1911:2038) at GlobePEER Phoenix (ASN 400330).