AS11317 GPN

GPN is the Great Plains Network, the regional research-and-education consortium that aggregates the campus and state R&E networks of the Great Plains states and hands them onward to Internet2 and the wider national cyberinfrastructure. It runs points of presence in Kansas City, Missouri and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its members are the region's research universities and state R&E networks.

What it's used for

This AS carries traffic without owning any. RIS sees no announced IPv4 or IPv6 prefixes at all — but 19 observed neighbours. That combination is not a broken record and not a dormant network; it is the defining signature of a regional aggregation network. GPN originates nothing because its members announce their own campus address space from their own AS numbers. What GPN provides is the path: its AS number appears in the middle of AS paths as the transit hop between a member campus and Internet2 or a peer regional network.

Read the two numbers together and the role is unambiguous. Zero prefixes rules out an eyeball or enterprise network — those exist precisely to announce their own space. Nineteen neighbours, roughly the count of member institutions and upstream R&E networks a GigaPoP of this size would connect, rules out a stub. The network is a transit fabric for science and campus traffic.

Notable

Address count is a bad proxy for importance here. A regional R&E network can move enormous volumes of research data — instrument feeds, genomics, climate and HPC transfers between member campuses and national facilities — while announcing not a single prefix of its own. Neighbour count, not prefix count, is what tells you what a network like this does.