How to get a list of research and academic ISP ?

Wed Nov 15 22:18:09 UTC 2006

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 06:46:06PM +0100, Maciej Kurant wrote:
> Dear all,
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> 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. 
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> 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. 

	that might be a flawed assumption. 

> 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: 
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> 1)       Is this approach to obtain a list of research and academic ISPs
> correct?
> 2)       Do you maybe know of such lists compiled before? 

	yes, check the NLANR/CAIDA data and the old MERIT/ISI datasets
	for NSFnet-era policy splits.

> 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?

	some universities have "startup" entites that are spun up under the
	perview of the university.  imho, its not common, but does happen.
 
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> Thank you in advance for your comments.
> 
> Maciej Kurant
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> EPFL IC ISC LCA3
> 
> 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> http://lcawww.epfl.ch/kurant
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