Operational BGP Communities

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Operational BGP Communities
Operational BGP Communities

Operational BGP Communities can be used to control various functions of the route server, such as redistribution of advertised prefixes, based on your ASN

Control the redistribution of advertised prefixes, based on an ASN

Please note that if the $PEER-AS is a four byte AS number you have to use the BGP Extended or Large Communities.
All BGP community examples on this page are based on DE-CIX Mumbai (AS59200). If you want to use BGP Communities at one of the other exchanges, please replace all occurrences of "59200" with the AS of the exchange:
IX-AS
Mumbai59200
Chennai24470
Delhi24457
Kolkata24508
Operational BGP Communities
Operational BGP Communities

Operational BGP Communities can be used to control various functions of the route server, such as redistribution of advertised prefixes, based on your ASN

Control the redistribution of advertised prefixes, based on an ASN

Please note that if the $PEER-AS is a four byte AS number you have to use the BGP Extended or Large Communities.
All BGP community examples on this page are based on DE-CIX Mumbai (AS59200). If you want to use BGP Communities at one of the other exchanges, please replace all occurrences of "59200" with the AS of the exchange:
Evaluation OrderGroupActionBGP Standard Community (RFC 1997)BGP Extended Community (RFC 4360)BGP Large Community (RFC 8092)
1ASN BasedDo not redistribute to $PEER-AS0:$PEER-ASrt:0:$PEER-AS **59200:0:PEER-AS
2Redistribute to $PEER-AS*59200:$PEER-ASrt:59200:$PEER-AS59200:1:$PEER-AS
3GeneralDo not redistribute0:59200rt:0:59200 **59200:0:0
4Redistribute to all (default)59200:59200rt:59200:5920059200:1:0

*Only useful in combination with one or more “do not announce” BGP Communities with lower priority that will allow an override e.g. 59200:$PEER

** This is not supported by some hardware vendors. In this case we also provide this function in the form rt:65534:$PEER-AS and rt:65534:59200

The route servers remove the aforementioned BGP Communities and BGP Extended Communities from a BGP announcement before re-distributing it.

More than one of the aforementioned BGP Communities and BGP Extended Communities can be added to a single BGP announcement. DE-CIX recommends not to add more than 50 of these communities as it makes handling complex and error-prone. If you need to do this, please contact

All BGP Communities and BGP Extended Communities that are not listed above are not touched by the route servers and transparently re-distributed. For backwards compatibility, routes with no community at all are distributed to all peers as well

You can check this in the DE-CIX Looking Glass. If you type your ASN into the global search field, you will find all matching prefixes from all DE-CIX route servers on all DE-CIX Internet Exchanges. By clicking on a prefix, you get the prefix information dialogue with details (BGP Communities etc.). You can apply further filters, e.g. filter for a specific route server or IX.

How the different communities can be used
Examples for Mumbai

Please note: In the following examples we only make use of Extended and Large Communities when it becomes necessary.

BGP announcements marked with the following communities are only re-distributed to AS64501 and AS64502 (both 2 Byte ASNs)

  • (0:59200)
  • (59200:64501)
  • (59200:64502)

BGP announcements marked with the following communities are re-distributed to all peers/ ASNs except AS64501 and AS64502:

  • (0:64501)
  • (0:64502)
  • (59200:59200)

BGP announcements marked with the following communities are only re-distributed to AS65550 (4 Byte ASN) and AS64501 (2 Byte ASN):

  • (0:59200)
  • (rt:59200:65550) or (59200:1:65550)
  • (59200:64501)
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