How to get a list of research and academic ISP ?

Wed Nov 15 21:16:51 UTC 2006

On Nov 15, 2006, at 12:46 PM, Maciej Kurant wrote:

> 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?

It's a way. The trouble is that

- most I2 As's also have "I1" connections and run BGP on that as well.
- Any corporate member of I2 has the right to announce their routes  
into I2

What I would do is to take the list and look at the names (on a list  
such as

http://www.multicasttech.com/status/asn_expand.txt

 From the name of the institution, you should be able to tell in most  
cases.

> 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?

There are certainly some academic aggregation SP's - NYSERNET and  
CANARIE and RENATER (google on those) come to mind.
> 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?

It may happen, but probably not often.
>
>
> Thank you in advance for your comments.
>
> Maciej Kurant
>
>

Hope this helps.

Regards
Marshall Eubanks

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> EPFL IC ISC LCA3
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> Maciej Kurant
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> PhD Student
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> CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
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> web site:  http://lcawww.epfl.ch/kurant
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