Autonomous system
AS229 MERIT-AS-6
Unclassified ARIN
Summary
Merit Network
education research legacy
Merit Network (MERIT-AS-6), Michigan's non-profit research and education network, one of the oldest continuously operating networks in the US.
What it's used for
- Backbone and connectivity for Michigan's universities, schools, libraries, and government (a research and education network).
Notable
- A non-profit research/education network, not a commercial ISP.
- The low AS number reflects an early-internet allocation, handed out roughly sequentially.
Interesting
- Merit operated the NSFNET backbone in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a pivotal step in the internet's growth beyond the original ARPANET.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
No exchange port on file. Many exchanges publish no participant list, so this is not proof of absence.
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-22, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 2 prefixes · 1.02K addresses IPv6 1 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| US | United States of America | 3 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- ARIN
- Handle
AS229- Registry name
- MERIT-AS-6
- Registrant
- Merit Network Inc.
- Abuse contact
- abuse@merit.edu
- Registered
- 1988-09-12
- Last changed
- 2026-09-21
- Allocation
- assigned
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 33% valid · 1 valid, 2 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 1 authorising AS229
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 3 of 3 announcements
- Route objects
- 3 naming AS229
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 442 networks and 1,779 prefixes, as published 2026-10-23. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere