In the preparation for upcoming 2nd (multihomed) connection to Internet I am looking into COMMUNITY attribute of BGP4 as a way (in conjunction with my own LOCAL_PREF) of load balancing traffic between my two internet links (both T3). After reading CISCO documentation I am still not clear on some issues: 1. Is COMMUNITY a transitive attribute only between me and my immediate upstream supplier or is it being propagated further into Internet (so I can influence how somebody ,say, 5 AS hops away from me sees my routes) ? 2. If COMMUNITY propagates into big I, and I set COMMUNITY to 3561:70 (for MCI to set LOCAL_PREF on my routes to 70) and my next hop supplier sets COMMUNITY of my routes to 3561:80, what happens ? what MCI is going to do ? 3. Is COMMUNITY a CISCO only or is it part of RFC ? Has any other router vendor implemented this parameter ? 4. Which major Internet providers have COMMUNITY/LOCAL_PREF implemented (I am aware of MCI and Sprint) ? 5. Your experiences, comments, suggestions ..... Thanks in advance, Walter Walter Towbin Telus Advanced Communications phone: 403-543-2032, fax: 403-543-2030, cell: 403-620-0019 walter.towbin@telus.com