Knowledgebase

US Dedicated (AS63018) supports optional BGP communities that let you control how your prefixes are announced to our upstream transit providers. Tagging a prefix with one of the communities below changes which upstream path is preferred for inbound traffic to that prefix.

These communities are optional. If you do not tag your prefixes with any community, the default behavior applies (see below).

Montreal has its own community set for our Montreal-only upstreams (Cogent and Zayo). See the Montreal section below.

Our Transit Upstreams

The community scheme below controls how your prefixes are announced to each of our transit upstreams. For reference, our current transit upstream providers are:

* Montreal only. At Montreal, Cogent and Zayo are our transit upstreams (GSL and Unitas are not present).

Reaching Major Networks

Major content networks such as Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, and Google are reached in two different ways depending on the site:

• US sites (NY, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle): these networks are reached via our transit upstreams, GSL and Unitas, both of which maintain extensive peering relationships with them. We do not peer directly with these networks at US sites.
• Montreal: in addition to transit via Cogent and Zayo, we peer directly at the CANIX — Canadian Internet Exchange (formerly QIX — Quebec Internet Exchange), which provides a shorter path to the networks listed below for Montreal-based traffic.

Networks we peer with directly at CANIX (Montreal only):

Note for Montreal BGP customers: All BGP customers in Montreal automatically benefit from our CANIX direct peering on their sessions — no configuration is required on your end. If for any reason you do not want your prefix announced to one or more CANIX peers (or to the CANIX route server, or to CANIX entirely), opt-out communities are available — see the CANIX Peer Opt-Out Communities section below.

What We Send You

When you establish a BGP session with AS63018, you will receive:

• A default route (0.0.0.0/0 for IPv4 and ::/0 for IPv6)
• Our internal routes (AS63018 prefixes)
• Local exchange routes (prefixes from other customers on the same edge router, so you can reach them directly without transiting the public internet)
• At Montreal only: all CANIX-learned routes (peers and route server), so you can reach CANIX peers directly through our edge

Default Behavior (no community tagged)

Default behavior differs between our US sites and Montreal:

• US sites (NY, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle): Your prefixes are announced to both transit upstreams, but they are not equal — GSL is preferred as the inbound path (announced clean), and Unitas receives your prefixes with AS path prepending to act as a backup. In practice, most inbound traffic arrives via GSL, and if GSL fails or withdraws the route, traffic automatically falls back to Unitas.
• Montreal: Your prefixes are announced to both Cogent and Zayo equally — both upstreams receive the prefix with no prepending. This is true equal-cost inbound by default, and is intentionally different from the US primary/backup model. CANIX direct peering also applies automatically (see the CANIX section above).

Available Communities — US Sites

The following communities apply at our US sites (NY, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle).

Important: Use only one traffic engineering community per prefix. Do not combine these communities on the same prefix. If multiple communities are tagged, the first matching policy takes effect and the others are ignored, which can produce unexpected results.

Available Communities — Montreal

The following communities apply only at Montreal, where our upstreams are Cogent (AS174) and Zayo (AS6461). CANIX-related opt-out communities are listed separately below.

Important: Use only one upstream traffic engineering community per prefix (the CANIX opt-out communities below may be combined with these).

CANIX Peer Opt-Out Communities (Montreal only)

By default, your prefixes are announced to every network we peer with at CANIX. If you want to suppress the announcement to a specific peer, to the CANIX route server, or to CANIX entirely, you can tag your prefix with one of the communities below. These communities affect only the CANIX announcement — your prefix continues to be announced to Cogent and Zayo as normal (subject to any upstream community above).

These communities can be combined with each other and with one upstream community.

Default Route Communities

The default route we send to you is tagged with a community that identifies which of our upstreams it was learned from. If you are doing community-based routing on your end, you can use these to make decisions about your outbound default.

US Sites

Montreal

These communities are informational only — you do not need to match them unless you want to. If you want to prefer one upstream's default over the other, you can set higher local-preference on routes tagged with the corresponding community.

Site Availability

Traffic engineering communities are now active at every AS63018 site. The community set available at each site depends on which upstreams are present (see the upstream and Montreal sections above).

Questions?

For questions about supported upstreams or the community scheme itself, please contact support.