AS11317 — GPN

Network type: education

AS11317 announces 1 IPv4 prefixes covering 512 addresses and 1 IPv6 prefixes.

About this network

GPN is the Great Plains Network, the regional research-and-education consortium that aggregates the campus and state R&E networks of the Great Plains states and hands them onward to Internet2 and the wider national cyberinfrastructure. It runs points of presence in Kansas City, Missouri and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its members are the region's research universities and state R&E networks.

What it's used for

This AS carries traffic without owning any. RIS sees no announced IPv4 or IPv6 prefixes at all — but 19 observed neighbours. That combination is not a broken record and not a dormant network; it is the defining signature of a regional aggregation network. GPN originates nothing because its members announce their own campus address space from their own AS numbers. What GPN provides is the path: its AS number appears in the middle of AS paths as the transit hop between a member campus and Internet2 or a peer regional network.

Read the two numbers together and the role is unambiguous. Zero prefixes rules out an eyeball or enterprise network — those exist precisely to announce their own space. Nineteen neighbours, roughly the count of member institutions and upstream R&E networks a GigaPoP of this size would connect, rules out a stub. The network is a transit fabric for science and campus traffic.

Notable

Address count is a bad proxy for importance here. A regional R&E network can move enormous volumes of research data — instrument feeds, genomics, climate and HPC transfers between member campuses and national facilities — while announcing not a single prefix of its own. Neighbour count, not prefix count, is what tells you what a network like this does.

This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy.

Announced prefixes

• 164.113.254.0/23
• 2001:49d0:3c0::/42

Upstream networks

• AS11537 Internet2
• AS293 ESnet

Downstream networks

• AS25969 St. Louis University
• AS2572 University of Missouri - dba the Missouri Research and Education Network (MOREnet)
• AS33189 South Dakota Board of Regents
• AS2698 Iowa State University of Science and Technology
• AS7896 The Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
• AS46832 University of Missouri - dba the Missouri Research and Education Network (MOREnet)
• AS2495 Kansas Research and Education Network
• AS57 University of Minnesota

Adjacent networks

• AS293 ESnet
• AS2698 Iowa State University of Science and Technology
• AS11537 Internet2
• AS6939 Hurricane Electric LLC
• AS7896 The Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
• AS25969 St. Louis University
• AS2572 University of Missouri - dba the Missouri Research and Education Network (MOREnet)
• AS33189 South Dakota Board of Regents
• AS2495 Kansas Research and Education Network
• AS46832 University of Missouri - dba the Missouri Research and Education Network (MOREnet)
• AS34927 iFog GmbH
• AS52025 ParadoxNetworks Limited
• AS11164 Internet2
• AS57 University of Minnesota

Internet exchanges

• Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange — Minneapolis, United States
• Kansas City Internet Exchange — Kansas City, United States