ACIX route server Informational BGP Communities

Route Origin

The route server will tag all prefixes with certain BGP Communities to indicate their origin. You can use this information to determine where a certain prefix has been injected into the ACIX switching platform.

Currently we tag the following information:

Switch: Indicates at which switch a prefix has been injected into the ACIX platform. We tag the corresponding edge switch of the port.

  • Example: edge01.fih1

Metro: The metropolitan region corresponding to the switch 

  • Example: Kinshasa

Country: The country corresponding to the above (in M.49 format) 

  • Example: Democratic Republic of the Congo

Continent: The continent corresponding to the above (in M.49 format) 

  • Example: Africa

This means that every prefix you will learn from the route servers will have four (additional) BGP Communities attached which will indicate location information.

BGP Community Graph

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:

  • 65101:*
  • 65102:*
  • 65103:*
  • 65104:*

Overview

ContinentM.49 Region Code (Continent)Continent BGP ComCountryM.49 Region Code (Country)Country BGP ComMetroMetro CodeMetro BGP Com

Edge Switch

Switch Code

Switch BGP Com

Africa

002

65104:2

Democratic Republic of the Congo 🇨🇩

180

65103:180

FIH (ACIX)

40000

65102:40000

edge01.fih1

40149

65101:40149

Unknown Continent

65535

65104:65535

Unknown Country

65535

65104:65535

Unknown Metro

65535

65102:65535

Unknown Switch

65535

65101:65535

Examples

Example 1

A prefix has the following BGP Communities attached to it:

  • 65104:2
  • 65103:180
  • 65102:40000
  • 65101:40149

From these BGP Communities you can deduce that this particular prefix has been injected in Africa (65104:2), Nigeria (65103:180) in metro region Lagos (65102:40000) at edge01.los1 (65101:40149).