Upstream BGP community support

Richard A Steenbergen ras at e-gerbil.net
Sat Oct 31 22:09:38 UTC 2009


On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 09:37:03PM +0100, Andy B. wrote:
> While most decent upstream providers support this kind of traffic
> engineering, one of them refuses to send and accept BGP communities. I
> tried to contact my upstream several times through different channels
> to get some background as to why they would not be able to provide us
> this service, but all we get is tickets that get closed without an
> answer. Management itself does not seem to bother either.
> 
> Is this normal or is it too much to ask for BGP communities from an
> upstream who has points of presence in the US, Europe and Asia?

Yes and no. There are a handful of old stodgy networks who are of the
belief that this kind of information is "proprietary", and therefore
should not be sent to customers or other networks on the Internet. My 
opinion is that those networks are "idiots", and therefore money should 
not be sent to them.

Even if (for whatever reason) you don't need a particular set of 
features in BGP communities, I personally think that they are an 
excellent indicator of the networks' general technical competence and 
ability to work with them on a wide variety of other issues. In this day 
and age a robust and functional set of communities should really be a 
requirement for any network provider.

<shamelessplug>
There was also a NANOG presentation on a pretty reasonable design and 
implementation of BGP communities for a service provider:

http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog40/presentations/BGPcommunities.pdf
</shamelessplug>

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)




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