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Hi friends I've been looking around for the past few days on a way to find the geolocation of the BGP AS's, preferably through the use of some API. I've been using the ripestat API for the majority of my work on this, but it comes up inconclusive on some of the AS's, for example AS 10000. RIPE tells me the location is in JP. Which is sort of fine, I just would like to narrow it down more to like a city / postal code / etc if possible. Is there another API suited for this? or is it just a manual task of fixing all the information once gathered.

Alternatively, if it is possible to grab the IP address of the actual AS itself, and not the range, that would likely work as well.

Claythearc
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  • I'm not sure what you mean. There are ASes, that span the entire world. There are many, many ASes that you really cannot nail down to a single location. – Ron Maupin Sep 18 '18 at 21:27
  • I guess I just misunderstand how ASes work then, which is possible too. I just assumed that while Charter, for example, may hold AS 20115. That AS must exist in a physical location no? Even if it handles traffic from across the US. – Claythearc Sep 18 '18 at 21:28
  • No. That AS could have entry points all over the U.S, and even in other countries. The organization that owns the AS may have a physical headquarters address, but that is really meaningless. In fact, Charter really no longer exists, having merged with TWC, creating Spectrum. TWC has at least one AS to which we connect in AZ, CA, TX, MN, and the northeast. Where would you consider that AS? – Ron Maupin Sep 18 '18 at 21:34
  • That I'm not sure. Just from what I had read around and googled, I assumed each AS had a really strong router, for lack of a better term, that handled moving traffic from one network off to another, and that each of those routers would have an IP address and be located somewhere physically. – Claythearc Sep 18 '18 at 21:37
  • A single AS can have hundreds or thousands of routers, scattered across a huge geographic area. An Autonomous System is really a network controlled by a single entity. It is autonomous from other networks controlled by other entities. The routing policies it employs are those of no other entity. That is really what an AS is. It need not be in any single location, and the network of the AS in many, many cases extends to multiple locations. – Ron Maupin Sep 18 '18 at 21:45
  • Ah yeah makes sense. Just for curiosity's sake then, would it be possible to find the locations of each of those routers? Like if I wanted to inspect 20115 for instance, and get the location for each of them. Would it be like the location keys here: https://stat.ripe.net/data/geoloc/data.json?resource=20115 – Claythearc Sep 18 '18 at 22:20
  • The AS owners consider their networks to be proprietary, and they will typically not disclose anything about the internals of their networks. Some go so far as to look for and reroute traceroute information to prevent the internal networks from being casually discovered. Also, there is constant change within an AS: routers are moved, replaced or added. – Ron Maupin Sep 18 '18 at 22:24
  • This question belongs in the Network Engineering community – Bruno Rijsman Sep 22 '18 at 00:01

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IP Geolocation isn't nearly accurate enough to pinpoint an IP to a specific City/ZIP code. In many cases, IPs from the same block will be used across a large area in an ISP's control, so it's not possible to be very accurate. Autonomous Systems don't really have "an IP", as there's no one specific location of them.

If you're looking for the locations where they peer to other providers, you might want to check out PeeringDB.

Weston Reed
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    I think that's actually what I was looking for, I just phrased it badly. So to clarify to make sure I'm reading this correctly, using AS 20115 and 714 for example. They share an exchange here, https://peeringdb.com/ix/22. So Atlanta would be the exchange location between the two ASes? My knowledge of networking is pretty small though so that could be wrong. – Claythearc Sep 18 '18 at 21:53
  • It's one of the exchange locations. Large networks often exchange at multiple locations, so keep that in mind. – Weston Reed Sep 18 '18 at 21:56
  • Also, don't count on PeeringDB listing *all* peering points. AS 702 (Verizon EMEA) only lists a few public peering points (at which it is willing to accept new peerings presumably). But it is 100% sure that 702 has *many* more peering points which are not listed. – Bruno Rijsman Sep 22 '18 at 00:00