Re: How many ISPs are out there?

Unless the network is lying to me again, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com said:

well, once upon a time.... you weren't really considered an "ISP" unless you were able to play the BGP game. So an ASN once was an hallmark of an I{A,S}P. Things change so I expect it is much harder to figure out, externally, what an I{A,S}P is than it used to be. I still use the ASN token as a discriminator. YMMV

Additionally, you need to subtract out the ones that have gone out of business. I was looking thru the ASN list and right off the top found about 5 that I recognized as defunct within the first 5000. (ok, ok, 5 / 5000... maybe you don't need to subtract them out after all) AlanC {stunned that we just got an ASN in the 2xxxxx range}