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.

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
Continent | M.49 Region Code (Continent) | Continent BGP Com | Country | M.49 Region Code (Country) | Country BGP Com | Metro | Metro Code | Metro 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).