How to get a list of research and academic ISP ?

Wed Nov 15 17:46:06 UTC 2006

Dear all,

I am a PhD student at EPFL, Switzerland. My recent research interest is in
large scale differences between the commercial and academic parts of the
Internet. 

Of course, in order to perform this kind of studies I need a way to
distinguish between these two worlds. I've learnt that Abilene does not
provide commercial connectivity. This means that BGP prefixes and AS paths
announced by Abilene BGP routers should lead only to research and academic
destinations. I have extracted (from the BGP tables at
http://abilene.internet2.edu/observatory) a list of all such destinations
and obtained 1333 ASes (for data form July 2006). The number looks
reasonable, but I would like to be sure that I am not making a mistake.
Therefore I would be grateful if you could answer the following questions: 

1)       Is this approach to obtain a list of research and academic ISPs
correct?

2)       Do you maybe know of such lists compiled before? 

3)       If I keep not only the destination ASes, but also all ASes on the
AS paths towards these destination I obtain a list of about 1400 ASes. How
should I understand this? Does it mean that some research and academic
destinations are reachable from Abilene only by traversing the commercial
Internet?

4)       Of course, research and academic ASes are often well connected to
the commercial Internet. My guess is that in most cases their peering
relationship is "customer-provider", where commercial ASes are providers. Is
it possible that an academic AS is a provider for some commercial ASes? If
so, does it happen often?

Thank you in advance for your comments.

Maciej Kurant

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EPFL IC ISC LCA3

Maciej Kurant

PhD Student

CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

web site:   <http://lcawww.epfl.ch/kurant> http://lcawww.epfl.ch/kurant

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