5. Handling BGP Communities

As specified in [RFC1997], when the high-order two octets of the community attribute is neither 0x0000 nor 0xffff, these two octets encode the AS number. Quite clearly, this would not work for a NEW BGP speaker with a non-mappable four-octet AS number. Such BGP speakers should use four-octet AS specific extended communities [RFC5668] instead.