<snip> I've been thinking about other information that could be conveyed in communities. For instance, bandwidth, delay and packet loss. If each router along the way modifies such a community (should probably be an extended one) then a much richer set of information would be available to multihomers to aid in route selection. Hmmm well isn't this not what OSPF/EIGRP are *supposed* to do but they only calculate the values once. I guess the logic being you don't want SPF calcs killing all the routers in an area. For BGP you could either follow this logic or update the adverts every "x" minutes/hours, does this offer any more information given it is so old. Or you change the advert more dynamically and you send Cisco shares soaring as we need to upgrade routers :o). Mind you is this not a bit like QoS Policy Propagation in BGP in reverse (in so much as you are asking for delay/bw/packet loss guarantees)? I think even basic communities add value to a clued in peer/customer. Being able to limit the distance of your adverts for example. For content heavy sites this can be useful if you want to say peer with joe-bloggs-AS so that people in joe-bloggs city get "better" access. An example of this is ip-plus see the URL below: http://www.ip-plus.net/technical/config_bgp-en.html#5 Regards, Kevin