AS577

AS577 is Bell Canada's national IP backbone autonomous system, registered under ARIN to the operator handle BACOM and identified on PeeringDB as the "Bell Canada Backbone." Bell Canada is the principal telecommunications subsidiary of BCE Inc., a publicly traded Canadian holding company (TSX/NYSE: BCE) headquartered in Verdun, Montreal, while the ASN's own ARIN registration lists an administrative address at 160 Elgin Street, Ottawa. The autnum record shows a registration event dated 1999-03-03, corroborated independently by a third-party BGP looking-glass that also reports the ASN as "Registered March 3, 1999" — a first-party RIR fact distinct from the many later entity-level contact updates (SYSAD-ARIN, IRRAD-ARIN, ANR1-ARIN, ABUSE1127-ARIN) nested under the same record. Routing data from RIPEstat and bgp.tools agree on roughly 1,566 announced IPv4 prefixes and 65 IPv6 prefixes, while CAIDA ranks the ASN 126th globally with clique-member (near-Tier-1) status, a customer cone of 460 ASNs, and a total AS degree of 320 neighbors dominated by customers. A conflicting bgp.he.net prefix count (16,340 v4 / 80 v6) was checked against the two agreeing sources and treated as an unreliable page-parse artifact rather than reconciled by guesswork. Bell Canada self-declares a Restrictive peering policy on PeeringDB, maintains public peering ports at five exchanges, and appears to have begun RPKI-invalid route filtering around August 2025. No notable public abuse signal ties AS577 itself to malicious infrastructure; third-party feeds show only background-level brute-force and spam reports typical of a large residential/business ISP with a broad subscriber base.

Operator

Bell Canada (ARIN org; PeeringDB net name "Bell Canada Backbone"; AS handle BACOM; parent BCE Inc.) [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/577, https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/577

Country / RIR

CA, ARIN [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/577

Allocated

1999-03-03 (ARIN RDAP autnum top-level registration event, corroborated by bgp.tools "Registered March 3, 1999"); last changed 2006-01-30 [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/577, https://bgp.tools/as/577

Org status

active; Bell Canada is the principal telecom subsidiary of BCE Inc. (TSX/NYSE: BCE), HQ Verdun, Montreal; ARIN registration address 160 Elgin Street, Ottawa, ON [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/577, https://www.bce.ca/about-bce/bce-overview

Contacts

ip.admin@bell.ca / ip_prov@bell.ca (administrative), irr-admin@bell.ca (routing), abuse@bellnexxia.net / abuse@sympatico.ca / abuse@bell.ca (abuse), bwnteam@bell.ca (technical) [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/577

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-07-11 tying AS577 itself to malicious infrastructure; no confirmed Spamhaus ASN-DROP listing located; blocklist.de and CleanTalk show background-level SSH/spam brute-force reports (CleanTalk ~4.78% spam-active rate) consistent with a large residential/business ISP's subscriber churn rather than dedicated abuse infrastructure. BGP hijack history and NANOG-archive abuse escalation could not be confirmed either way (tool access limits) — treated as Unknown, not a clean-record claim [Likely for overall assessment; Unknown for hijack history] — https://www.blocklist.de/en/search.html?as=577, https://cleantalk.org/blacklists/as577, https://www.spamhaus.org/blocklists/do-not-route-or-peer/

Network & routing

Network type

NSP, North America scope per PeeringDB self-classification; national backbone/carrier network, near-Tier-1 (CAIDA clique member) [Confirmed] — https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/577, https://asrank.caida.org/asns/577

Size

~1,566 IPv4 prefixes (~7.0M addresses) and 65 IPv6 prefixes, cross-corroborated by RIPEstat and bgp.tools; customer cone of 460 ASNs / 27,910 prefixes / ~23.8M addresses per CAIDA [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS577, https://bgp.tools/as/577, https://asrank.caida.org/asns/577

Routing/peering

total AS degree 320 (256 customers, 58 peers, 6 providers); CAIDA AS Rank #126 globally, clique member. Restrictive self-declared PeeringDB policy; public peering ports at Equinix Ashburn/Chicago/NY, Seattle IX, and NYIX, plus private interconnects [Confirmed]. Note: bgp.he.net's own prefix-count summary (16,340 v4 / 80 v6) conflicts with the RIPEstat/bgp.tools figures and is flagged unreliable rather than adopted

[Likely for policy detail] — https://asrank.caida.org/asns/577, https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/577

RPKI

reported to validate ROV and filter RPKI-invalid announcements from roughly August 2025; exact valid/invalid prefix counts not independently re-queried per-prefix [Likely] — https://bgp.tools/as/577, https://isbgpsafeyet.com/

Notable usage

national consumer/business Internet backbone for Bell's fibre, wireless, and enterprise customers across Canada; Bell also holds other ASNs for distinct segments, e.g. AS6539 ("Bell Canada, formerly Group Telecom" per PeeringDB)

[Likely] — https://bgp.he.net/AS577, https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/577, https://bgp.tools/as/577

Related ASNs

AS6539 (Bell Canada / formerly Group Telecom, per PeeringDB net entry) [Likely] — https://www.peeringdb.com/net/226

Analyst note

registration date pulled from the autnum's own top-level events[] (not the deeper entity-nested POC dates, which range 2002–2025 and were correctly excluded as decoys); the bgp.he.net prefix-count discrepancy was flagged and excluded rather than silently averaged with the RIPEstat/bgp.tools consensus.