AS751

AS751 is a legacy autonomous system registered to Merit Network, Inc. that shows zero announced IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes and zero observed BGP peers in the routing sources checked, indicating the ASN is dormant rather than actively routed today.

Merit Network is an independent nonprofit research-and-education (R&E) network founded in 1966 by Michigan's public universities. It won a roughly $39M National Science Foundation award in 1987 to manage NSFNET, the pre-commercial US Internet backbone, and it originated and still operates RADb, one of the Internet's oldest routing registries. AS751 is one of several ASNs Merit holds; it does not appear to carry Merit's current production traffic.

ARIN RDAP records AS751 (name MERIT-AS-17) with a top-level registration event dated 1990-10-08 and a last-changed event dated 2012-04-02. RDAP status for the ASN is Active, and Merit itself remains an active, operating nonprofit — the "Active" registry status describes the registration record, not live route announcements.

AS751 is confirmed dormant: RIPEstat's routing-status shows announced: false, 0 prefixes / 0 addresses announced, 0/330 v4 and 0/323 v6 RIS peers seeing it, and 0 observed neighbours — with no first_seen/last_seen history at all. bgp.tools separately returned HTTP 429 (rate-limited) for AS rank, customer-cone size, upstreams, peers, and RPKI validation during this session, but CAIDA AS Rank answered directly: rank 79,459 (the standard sentinel for unrouted ASNs), with a singleton customer cone (1 ASN, 0 prefixes, 0 addresses) and zero AS degree, which also confirms upstreams and peers as genuinely empty rather than merely unobserved. bgp.he.net and ipinfo.io independently agree AS751 currently originates 0 prefixes and shows 0 BGP peers.

Operator

Merit Network, Inc. (legal name Michigan Educational Research Information Triad, Inc. (MERIT), d/b/a Merit Network, Inc.; nonprofit R&E network, Ann Arbor, MI) [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP, merit.edu/about/history

Country / RIR

US, ARIN [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP autnum record

Allocated

1990-10-08 (ARIN RDAP top-level autnum registration event); last changed 2012-04-02 [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/751

Org status

ARIN RDAP status Active; Merit Network is an active independent nonprofit corporation, founded 1966, still operating commercial network/security services as of 2026 [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/751, merit.edu/about

Contacts

abuse@merit.edu; admin ipreg@merit.edu; technical operations@merit.edu; org address 880 Technology Dr., Suite B, Ann Arbor, MI 48108 [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/751

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-07-27; NANOG archive search returned no matches for AS751; Spamhaus ASN-DROP and Talos reputation lookup were not directly reachable this session (404/403) so are unchecked, not clean-listed

Network & routing

Network type

independent nonprofit R&E network, governed by Michigan's public universities; AS751 is dormant (0 announcements) [Confirmed for org type; Confirmed for dormant classification] — merit.edu/about, RIPEstat routing-status

Size

0 IPv4 prefixes, 0 IPv6 prefixes announced; RIPEstat routing-status confirms announced: false, 0/330 v4 and 0/323 v6 RIS peers seeing it, 0 observed neighbours, no first_seen/last_seen history [Confirmed]. CAIDA AS rank 79,459 (sentinel rank for unrouted ASNs); customer cone is a singleton — 1 ASN, 0 prefixes, 0 addresses — with 0 AS degree, confirming upstreams and peers as genuinely empty [Confirmed] — RIPEstat routing-status, api.asrank.caida.org/v2/restful/asns/751, bgp.he.net/AS751, ipinfo.io/AS751. bgp.tools returned HTTP 429 (rate-limited) for these fields this session and could not corroborate independently

Routing/peering

no formal public peering-policy document verified for AS751 (PeeringDB lookups returned 404) [Unknown]. Merit's site describes a member "Peering & Caching" service (Layer 3 peering plus Internet2 Peer Exchange participation), but this is a general member-service description, not an AS751-specific policy statement

[Likely] — merit.edu/solutions/networking-security/peering-caching

RPKI

not assessable this pass — bgp.tools returned HTTP 429; no prefixes are currently announced to validate [Unknown]

Notable usage

Merit (with Michigan Strategic Fund, IBM, and MCI) won the 1987 NSF award (~$39M) to manage NSFNET, the pre-commercial US Internet backbone; Merit also originated and operates RADb (Internet Routing Registry). AS751 is retained as one of Merit's legacy ASN registrations and currently shows no live announcements

[Confirmed] — merit.edu/about/history, bgp.he.net/AS751

Related ASNs

none independently verified for AS751 in this research pass; Merit is known to hold multiple ASNs beyond AS751, but no specific sibling-ASN list was sourced — recorded as an empty array rather than null [Unknown]

Analyst note

Encountered as a dormant/legacy Merit Network ASN. RDAP registration (1990-10-08) and Active status are first-party ARIN facts and were preserved rather than nulled. Dormancy is Confirmed via RIPEstat's routing-status (announced: false, 0/0 prefixes/addresses, 0 observed neighbours, no first/last-seen history), independent of the bgp.tools rate limit. as_rank, customer_cone_size, and upstreams/peers_sample emptiness are filled/confirmed from CAIDA AS Rank; RPKI remains a genuine sourced Unknown (no announced prefixes to validate).