PIE Karachi GlobePEER Route Server Informational BGP Communities

DE-CIX PS Team Updated by DE-CIX PS Team

We use BGP Communities to tag some additional information on redistributed routes.These kind of BGP Communities will be referred to as Informational BGP Communities.

Route Origin

The route servers will tag all routes to indicate their origin. You can use this information to determine where a certain route has been injected into the PIE Karachi switching platform. This gives you the option to filter routes learned from the route servers based on geographical location.

Every route you receive from the route servers will have four (additional) BGP Communities attached which indicate location information:

  • Switch: e.g. 175 for edge01.khi1 (see table below for more information)
  • Metro: e.g. 39 for Karachi (see table below for more information)
  • Country: e.g. 586 for Pakistan (UN M49 format)
  • Continent: e.g. 142 for Asia (UN M49 format)
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:
140307:1911:*
140307:1912:*
140307:1913:*
140307:1914:*

Route Origin Overview

Continent
140307:1914:<CONTINENT> 		Country
140307:1913:<COUNTRY> 		Metro
140307:1912:<METRO> 		Switch
Facility
140307:1911:<SWITCH>
Asia
140307:1914:142 		Pakistan 🇵🇰
140307:1913:586 		Karachi (KHI)
140307:1912:47 		edge01.khi1
Technical Building, Datacenter
140307:1911:175
Unknown Continent
140307:1914:65535 		Unknown Country
140307:1913:65535 		Unknown Metro
140307:1912:65535 		Unknown Switch
140307:1911:65535
If the exact location of a customer cannot be determined from our database, or in certain special cases, we mark these routes with 140307:191{1-4}:65535, meaning "unknown".
Example

A route has the following BGP Communities attached:

  • 140307:1914:142
  • 140307:1913:586
  • 140307:1912:39
  • 140307:1911:175

From these BGP Communities you can deduce that a given route learned from the PIE Karachi route servers (AS140307) has been injected into the PIE Karachi platform from Asia (140307:1914:142), Pakistan (140307:1913:586) in metro region Karachi (140307:1912:39) at edge01.khi1 (140307:1911:175).

How did we do?

IRAQ-IXP Route Server Informational BGP Communities

Ruhr-CIX GlobePEER Route Server Informational BGP Communities

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