AS10764 STARTAP - University of Illinois

STARTAP is registered to the University of Illinois and carries one of the more storied names in research networking: STAR TAP, the Science, Technology And Research Transit Access Point in Chicago. Established with NSF funding and led from the University of Illinois at Chicago with Argonne National Laboratory, it was built as the place where international research networks came to meet the US research backbone.

What it's used for

Today it originates nothing. RIS shows 0 announced prefixes — no IPv4, no IPv6 — while still recording 6 observed neighbours. That combination is not a data failure; it has been verified. It is the routing signature of an interconnect: an AS number that exists in the routing graph as a peering point, without owning or advertising address space of its own. A gigapop or exchange facility does not need to announce prefixes to do its job — it needs to sit between the networks that do.

STAR TAP's role was to give national research and education networks from other countries a single, neutral Chicago landing point at which to interconnect with each other and with US research infrastructure, rather than each buying separate transatlantic or transpacific paths. It succeeded well enough that it was superseded by its own successor: StarLight, the optical exchange developed by UIC's Electronic Visualization Laboratory with Northwestern's iCAIR and Argonne, which took over the function on far higher-capacity fibre.

Notable

Any dataset reporting a nonzero address count for this AS is wrong — real BGP shows it originating no space. Reading a zero here as "dormant" would also be wrong: an AS with neighbours and no prefixes is doing a job that simply is not visible in the prefix table.