AS549

AS549 is a legacy Canadian autonomous system number registered under ARIN, currently held by ORION (the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network), a not-for-profit research-and-education (R&E) network founded in 2001 as ORANO and now one of the twelve provincial/territorial members forming Canada's National Research and Education Network alongside CANARIE. The RDAP AS name "GTANET-AS" preserves an older technical identity — GTAnet Networking, historically tied to the University of Toronto's networking infrastructure — and that branding still surfaces in the network's public looking glass at gtanet.ca, even though the legal registrant today is ORION (ARIN org handle ORANO). ORION's fibre network spans roughly 6,000 km with 30+ points of presence, connecting nearly all of Ontario's universities, colleges, school boards, and teaching hospitals. The standout triage fact for AS549 is that it has gone dark: RIPEstat shows zero currently announced IPv4/IPv6 prefixes and zero observed BGP neighbours, with a last-seen announcement (205.211.95.0/24) on 2025-09-13; third-party BGP trackers (bgp.he.net, bgp.tools) independently corroborate that the ASN has not been visible in the global routing table since around April 16, 2026. No public abuse signal, outage disclosure, or NANOG/community discussion of the cause was found — the withdrawal from the routing table appears undocumented publicly.

Operator

ORION (Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network), ARIN registrant org handle ORANO, legacy/technical branding "GTAnet Networking" still used for the gtanet.ca looking glass [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/549, https://www.orion.on.ca/about-us/who-we-are/, https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/549

Country / RIR

Canada (CA), ARIN [Confirmed] — RIPEstat abuse-contact-finder (authoritative_rir: arin), CAIDA ASN Rank API

Allocated

1989-11-09 (ARIN RDAP autnum TOP-LEVEL registration event — a first-party RIR registry fact, not an IEEE/OUI artifact; predates ORION's 2001 founding, consistent with the ASN having an earlier registrant before transfer/rename to ORANO/ORION); last changed 2025-12-10

[Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/549 (corroborated independently by A3, A5)

Org status

RDAP autnum status "active"; ORION is an active not-for-profit corporation founded 2001 (as ORANO), following $32.4M joint investment with the Ontario Government [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/549, https://www.orion.on.ca/about-us/who-we-are/

Contacts / address

engineering@orion.on.ca (technical/administrative/abuse); 211 Yonge Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto, ON M5B 1M4, Canada [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/549, https://stat.ripe.net/AS549

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-07-11 — not in Spamhaus ASN-DROP, general threat/abuse feeds, or NANOG mailing-list archives naming AS549, GTAnet, or GTANET-AS; the routing-table withdrawal since ~2026-04-16 is a visibility fact, not an abuse finding, and has no corresponding public incident disclosure

Network & routing

Network type

Research & Education Network — Ontario's provincial NREN, not-for-profit, part of Canada's National Research and Education Network [Confirmed] — https://www.orion.on.ca/about-us/who-we-are/, https://www.orion.on.ca/the-orion-community/orion-community-partners/canadas-national-research-and-education-network/

Size / routing status

dormant — 0 IPv4 prefixes / 0 IPv4 addresses and 0 IPv6 prefixes currently announced; customer cone = 1 ASN (itself), 0 prefixes, 0 addresses; historically first seen announcing 198.96.18.0/24 on 2000-08-18, last seen announcing 205.211.95.0/24 on 2025-09-13; not visible in the global routing table since approximately 2026-04-16 per independent third-party trackers

[Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS549, CAIDA ASN Rank API, https://bgp.he.net/AS549, https://bgp.tools/as/549

Routing/peering

0 RIS peers seeing it (0/325 v4, 0/322 v6); CAIDA degree total 0 (customer 0, peer 0, provider 0); no live upstreams or peers [Confirmed]. PeeringDB (operator-submitted, not confirmed on ORION's own site) lists a Restrictive policy — minimum 2000 Mbps for direct peering, routes advertised to route servers, public looking glass at gtanet.ca/looking-glass/

[Likely] — https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/549

RPKI

not assessable — AS549 announces no prefixes, so no ROAs exist to validate; RIPEstat's ASN-level rpki-validation check requires a prefix parameter that was not supplied [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS549

Notable usage

connects nearly all of Ontario's R&E institutions (~100 organizations, incl. 21 universities, 22 colleges, 34 school boards, 13 teaching hospitals/medical research centres) over a ~6,000 km optical fibre network with 30+ PoPs, up to 100 Gbps capability; provides connectivity, cybersecurity, cloud/HPC access, and training to roughly 1.7 million people in Ontario's R&E community

[Confirmed] — https://www.orion.on.ca/about-us/who-we-are/, https://www.orion.on.ca/why-orion/our-network/

ASN / AS name

AS549 / GTANET-AS [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/549

Disambiguation

AS549 must not be confused with (1) SolarWinds' "Orion" IT-monitoring software (2020 SUNBURST breach) — an unrelated product-name collision, not a network; or (2) "Orion Network Limited" (AS41564 / AS58065), a separate ISP flagged on CleanTalk/scamalytics — a different ASN entirely

[Confirmed] — https://cleantalk.org/blacklists/as41564, https://scamalytics.com/ip/isp/orion-network-limited

Analyst note

AS549 is a dormant/legacy ASN with a first-party 1989 ARIN registration date that predates its current registrant (ORION, founded 2001) — the number likely changed hands or was renamed within ARIN's records rather than being freshly allocated to ORION. It went dark from the global routing table around April 2026 with no public explanation found.