AS591

AS591 is a legacy autonomous system number registered under ARIN to NSTN, Inc., the operating name behind the Nova Scotia Technology Network — one of Canada's earliest commercial Internet service providers. NSTN was founded around 1989–1990 by Michael Martineau as a subsidiary of the Dartmouth, Nova Scotia firm Software Kinetics, set up under a provincial research-and-development contract to build out an R&D data network for the province. The company grew quickly through the early 1990s and, by 1994, marketed itself as "Canada's largest Internet provider," building per-capita Internet coverage across Nova Scotia that reportedly outpaced other Canadian provinces at the time. The ARIN-registered organization behind the ASN, NSTNIN-1, still lists a 201 Brownlow Ave, Dartmouth, NS office as its address of record. Independent Nova Scotia internet-history retrospectives describe the company's commercial operations winding down by around 1999, and the registry record itself corroborates a long dormancy: the technical point of contact (Michael Martineau) has gone unvalidated by ARIN since 2011, and every routing source consulted — RIPEstat and CAIDA AS Rank — agrees AS591 announces zero IPv4 and zero IPv6 prefixes today, with zero observed BGP peers and a customer cone limited to the ASN itself. No PeeringDB record exists for AS591, and no live official operator website could be found; the historical nstn.ca domain now presents a TLS certificate for an unrelated company (fibernetics.ca). No notable public abuse signal was found as of July 2026.

Operator

NSTN, Inc. (ARIN org NSTNIN-1 / autnum name "NSTN-AS"; historically "Nova Scotia Technology Network"), 201 Brownlow Ave, Dartmouth, NS B3B 1W2, Canada [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/591

Country / RIR

CA, ARIN [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/591, https://stat.ripe.net/AS591

Allocated

1990-02-28 (ARIN RDAP autnum TOP-LEVEL registration event); last changed 1996-06-10 [Confirmed, corroborated independently by two research angles reading the same top-level events[] array] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/591

Org status

registry status "active" in ARIN (allocation not formally returned), but effectively defunct as an operating company — technical POC unvalidated by ARIN since 2011-06-11, zero current routing, no live operator website, and independent history sources describe cessation of operations around 1999 [Confirmed for the RDAP/routing facts; Likely that the underlying company is fully defunct] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/591, https://bgp.he.net/AS591

Contacts

abuse/technical contact is an individual mailbox on the nstn.ca domain registered to the NSTN technical POC, Michael Martineau (ARIN handle MM583-ARIN; authoritative RIR: ARIN) — the personal address is not republished here; historical domain nstn.ca no longer operated by NSTN (now resolves under an unrelated company's certificate, fibernetics.ca)

[Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS591

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-07-17 against Spamhaus resources or general threat-feed search coverage; abuse.ch URLhaus/ThreatFox ASN report pages were bot-gated and could not be directly loaded, so this is a search-coverage-based null rather than a confirmed first-party page check

Network & routing

Network type

historical regional ISP / provincial R&D network (Nova Scotia, Canada); now legacy/inactive — no live commercial operation [Likely] — https://nshdpi.ca/is/hist/nshistory47.html, https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/591

Size

dormant — 0 announced IPv4 prefixes, 0 announced IPv6 prefixes; customer cone = 1 ASN (itself), 0 prefixes, 0 addresses [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS591, https://asrank.caida.org/asns/591

Routing/peering

NOT announced — 0/326 RIS peers seeing v4, 0/322 seeing v6, 0 observed neighbours; CAIDA asnDegree total 0 (customer 0, peer 0, provider 0); no PeeringDB record [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS591, https://asrank.caida.org/asns/591, https://bgp.he.net/AS591

RPKI

not assessable — AS591 announces no prefixes, so RIPEstat's rpki-validation check was skipped (requires a specific prefix) [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS591

Notable usage

NSTN ("Nova Scotia Technology Network") was among Canada's earliest regional/commercial ISPs, founded ~1989–1990 by Michael Martineau under Software Kinetics per a provincial R&D contract; by 1994 it billed itself as Canada's largest Internet provider. Local retrospectives place its commercial wind-down around 1999

[Likely, secondary historical sourcing] — https://nshdpi.ca/is/hist/nshistory47.html

Related ASNs

Unknown — no related-ASN grouping found for this registrant in the sources consulted

Identity-conflict note

one research angle returned a materially different profile for "NSTN, Inc." (described as "National Science & Technology Network, Inc.," based in California, founded 1987, serving commercial/government/military clients). This directly contradicts the first-party ARIN RDAP registrant address (Dartmouth, NS, Canada) and the independently-sourced Nova Scotia history account, and is not used in this entry's JSON; flagged here rather than silently dropped, per the no-fabrication/conflicting-sources rule [Unknown — likely a mismatched identification with an unrelated same-acronym organization] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/591