BGP Administrative Distances

Administrative distance is a way to set the preference of different routing protocols. Routers use administrative distances as a tiebreaker, with the lower administrative distance being the winner and subsequently entered into the router's routing table. BGP does not use administrative distances during the route selection process. BGP uses administrative distances to select which routes are placed in the routing table.

Three administrative distances are associated with BGP:

• Internal (IBGP) Routes are learned from IBGP peers. Default administrative distance is 200.

• External (EBGP) Routes are learned from EBGP peers. Default administrative distance is 20.

• Local Routes are generated locally. Default administrative distance is 20.