On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 11:09 PM, Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> wrote:
Yes and no. There are a handful of old stodgy networks who are of the belief that this kind of information is "proprietary", and therefore should not be sent to customers or other networks on the Internet. My opinion is that those networks are "idiots", and therefore money should not be sent to them.
I would not say that my upstream is an old stodgy network and certainly will I not consider them as "idiots", because they seem to know what they are doing. I'd rather say they are pretty ignorant when it comes to some "advanced" customer requirements. By "they", I am referring myself to Hurricane Electric. But you are right: money should not be sent to them while they lack any kind of BGP community support.
Even if (for whatever reason) you don't need a particular set of features in BGP communities, I personally think that they are an excellent indicator of the networks' general technical competence and ability to work with them on a wide variety of other issues. In this day and age a robust and functional set of communities should really be a requirement for any network provider.
We're almost 2010. Hurricane Electric, please do something about it! Andy