AS182

AS182 is an early Autonomous System Number registered under ARIN to Merit Network, Inc., a Michigan-based nonprofit research and education network (REN) founded in 1966 by Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University. The ARIN autnum record carries a registration date of 1988-04-28, placing AS182 among the lowest-numbered and earliest-assigned ASNs still on the books; the record was last changed 2012-04-02. Merit carries unusual historical weight because it managed the NSFNET backbone (1987–1995) with IBM and MCI — the network that connected US research universities and seeded the commercial Internet — and it had connected to ARPANET in 1983. Despite that pedigree, AS182 is operationally dormant today: BGP looking glasses (bgp.he.net, bgp.tools) show it originating zero IPv4 and zero IPv6 prefixes with no observed peers or upstreams as of June 2026. The triage point is that the ASN is administratively valid (ARIN allocation intact) but absent from the global routing table; Merit's active routing is conducted under separate ASNs, notably AS237. No notable public abuse signal was found as of 2026-06-18 — it is a clean, legacy, nonprofit-held ASN, and because it announces no routable space there are effectively no IPs to attribute. Merit also operates the RADb Internet Routing Registry, a security-positive community function.

Operator

Merit Network, Inc. (ARIN OrgId MICH-Z; 880 Technology Dr., Suite B, Ann Arbor, MI 48108-8963) [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP (https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/182)

Country / RIR

US, ARIN [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP

Allocated

ARIN autnum RegDate 2002-09-20 at the registrant-POC level; the AS182 autnum registration event is dated 1988-04-28 and the record was last changed 2012-04-02 (these are ARIN registry dates, not IEEE-issued data) [Confirmed for shown dates] — ARIN RDAP (https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/182)

Org status

active holder (Merit Network, Inc.), an independent nonprofit 501(c)(3) governed by Michigan's public universities, tax-exempt since 1980; operates ~4,000 miles of fiber in Michigan [Confirmed] — https://www.merit.edu/about/, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/382210903

Contacts

Abuse abuse@merit.edu / +1-734-527-5740 (NETWO26-ARIN); Admin ipreg@merit.edu / +1-734-763-3448 (IN-ORG-ARIN); Tech operations@merit.edu / +1-734-527-5717 (MERIT-ARIN) [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-06-18; absent from Spamhaus ASN-DROP (430 entries on fetch date), AbuseIPDB, FraudGuard, and reviewed community ASN blocklists; no NANOG incident thread referencing AS182 as a bad actor. Dormant routing means no attributable IPs — https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/asndrop.json, https://bgp.tools/as/182

Network & routing

Network type

regional Research and Education Network (REN), legacy/dormant ASN (Merit's active routing runs under AS237) [Confirmed] — https://www.merit.edu/network/, https://bgp.he.net/AS182

Size

zero — originates 0 IPv4 prefixes, 0 IPv6 prefixes, ~0 routable addresses as of 2026-06 [Confirmed] — bgp.he.net/AS182, bgp.tools/as/182

Routing/peering

dormant — 0 observed upstreams, 0 observed BGP peers, 0 RIS peers; not present in the global routing table as of 2026-06 [Confirmed]. Any peering policy on PeeringDB net/928 (selective; IPv4/IPv6/multicast; IXes Any2Chicago, DET-iX, Equinix Chicago, GRIX) applies to Merit's active ASN AS237, not to dormant AS182 [Likely for AS237; not separately documented for AS182] — bgp.he.net/AS182, bgp.tools/as/182, https://www.peeringdb.com/net/928

RPKI

no announced prefixes, so per-prefix RPKI is not determinable; bgp.he.net shows 0 RPKI-valid and 0 RPKI-invalid originations, consistent with announcing nothing [Confirmed for the no-prefix state; per-prefix Unknown] — bgp.he.net/AS182

Notable usage

held by Merit Network, Inc., operator of the NSFNET backbone (1987–1995) — a direct precursor to the commercial Internet; connected to ARPANET in 1983; one of the earliest ASNs ever assigned; Merit also runs the RADb routing registry — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_Network, https://www.merit.edu/about/history/, https://www.radb.net/

Related ASNs

AS237 (MERIT-AS-14, Merit's active routing/peering ASN) [Confirmed] — https://www.peeringdb.com/net/928, https://bgp.tools/as/182

Analyst note

encountered as a historic NSFNET-era curiosity and a dormant, nonprofit-held legacy ASN; WHOIS resolves to Merit Network, Inc. The peering/IX detail belongs to AS237. Clean legacy ASN. AS rank, customer cone size, and AS182's own IX presence are Unknown (the canonical RDAP capture was truncated before CAIDA fields, and 0 prefixes/peers implies an effectively empty cone).