Does anyone know if ANS, digex, mci etc. provide communities that encompass their internal/customer routes?
Can you be a little more precise? Most providers probably use communities to tag subsets of the routes they carry, and some set of those communities, either through inclusion or exclusion, almost certainly describes the set of customer routes carried by that provider. (I'm sure this can be stated more clearly.) GTE certainly does, I'm pretty sure MCI still does, etc. Now, will we "provide" these communities? Do you mean send-community to a customer? To a peer? Many of a provider's internal communities would be at best irrelevant and at worst potentially harmful in the context of another AS's policy. With no good way to delete such communities while preserving communities that describe their customer base (and ixnay on "match community... set community") why would a provider want to send all community tags to either a customer or a peer? Another question is, "Why do you want this info?" Taking full transit routes from a provider and trying to set localpref or MED based on whether the destination is a customer or peer network? If you are taking transit, there are good arguments for *not* running default-free.
If certain ones don't, is there any reason that they have against such a community?
See above. Some/most providers can probably be convinced to send community-tagged routes to customers (hey, the customer's not *always* wrong, and it depends on how much proprietary configuration info a provider is worried about conveying -- of course, I find this last amounts to mostly hogwash). Nobody's going to send them to peer networks. ---- Kirby Files Network Engineer GTE Internetworking kfiles@bbnplanet.com