AS10961 BGP-AS

BGP-AS is the Boston GigaPoP, the regional research-and-education aggregation point operated out of Boston University. RIS observes 2 IPv4 prefixes covering 2,304 addresses, no IPv6, and 3 observed neighbours. Every sampled PTR resolves under bu.edu, which is the clearest possible confirmation of who runs the infrastructure.

What it's used for

A GigaPoP is a shared high-speed exchange point where universities, research institutions and other non-profits in a region hand traffic to each other and to national research backbones such as Internet2, instead of each buying commodity transit separately. This AS carries that function for the Boston area. The reverse DNS is revealing: names like comm595-bdr-gw05-po1931-comm595-bdr-gw01-bvi931.bu.edu are router-interface and point-to-point link descriptions, exactly the kind of infrastructure naming you see on the inside of an exchange rather than on end-user address space. The dhcp-acadmin-204-8-156-5.bu.edu entry shows some of the space also serves campus use.

Notable

Boston University is a founding member of Northern Crossroads (NoX), the New England regional exchange, and this AS sits in that lineage. Small address counts are normal for exchange infrastructure: what matters is what transits it, not how many hosts live in it.

Interesting

The handle is an accident waiting to confuse anyone who reads it quickly. BGP-AS here stands for Boston GigaPoP, not the Border Gateway Protocol.