AS4901 CAAREN

CAAREN is the Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network, a regional research and education network operated by The George Washington University in Washington, DC.

What it's used for

• Serves as the capital area's research and education network, connecting GW and affiliated institutions to Internet2 and to the wider R&E ecosystem.
• Provides network services to schools, libraries, hospitals, government institutions and other research organizations across the District of Columbia, Northern Virginia and Maryland.
• Operated as a service by GW's Research Technology Services rather than as a commercial ISP.

Notable

• Because it is an R&E network rather than an eyeball ISP, its traffic skews toward institutional and research flows: campus connectivity, data-intensive science and inter-institutional links.
• The low AS number here is a reissue, not an early-internet allocation. ARIN registered it to GW in 2013, when CAAREN was being built out.

Interesting

• CAAREN gives a single university the role of regional R&E provider for the nation's capital, a model more often filled by a state-level consortium than by one institution.