BGP communities AS1299

Arelion provide the following communities in order to allow prepending (making a route less attractive) or to stop announcements to specific peers. It should be noted that this does not apply to all Arelion customers – only those peers specifically noted below.

Local preference action communities let you control the priority Arelion gives to your routes within AS1299. By tagging your BGP announcements, your connection can be set as a primary path or a backup – giving you precise control of your inbound traffic and how traffic is routed towards you from AS1299. For origin-specific routing control, see our origin communities.

By default, the priority you set on a route applies across Arelion’s entire network. Using our regional local-preference communities you can lower the priority of your route in specific regions– while keeping the original priority in the region where the route was learnt originally. This is useful when you want Arelion to prefer your connection in one region (e.g., Europe) but treat it as lower priority or backup in another (e.g., North America).

AS1299 accepts and listens to the BGP graceful shutdown community; 65535:0, compliant with IETF RFC8326. This reduces the amount of traffic lost when BGP sessions are to be shut down, for example, during planned work. When announced by a customer, AS1299 will set local preference to 20, which will ensure the use of alternative paths, if they exist. Arelion External During planned works, AS1299 will always signal this community to all customers and peers, allowing them to also re-route within their network.

Read our guide 'What is BGP?' to get more in-depth knowledge.

Note: It is not possible to increase local-pref using these communities, only decrease is supported.

This functionality allows an Arelion customer to tag a prefix with an RTBH community, which will trigger Arelion to discard (or null-route) traffic destined for the tagged prefix as soon as it enters our network. More-specific or overlapping prefixes are supported, IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes can be tagged up to a /32 or /128, respectively. Regional RTBH allows you to selectively discard traffic only within the region that you announce it.

While not available by default, this add-on feature can be enabled by a tech change request made to our NOC, or during service delivery..

• Unless stated otherwise, these features are available for all BGP customers.
• All of these are subject to change; customers and peers should check the portal and the RIPE database entry for AS1299.

These are provided on a best effort basis and not subject to product-specific SLAs.