Summary

  • At ARIN 57, Steve Wallace reported roughly 1,100 networks in Internet2's customer cone and just two networks with ASPAs in its part of the research and education community the previous week.
  • His experimental ASPA Planner draws a candidate provider graph from relationship and routing data. Wallace found its suggestions stronger near the edge of the Internet than near the core.

Steve Wallace brought a neat diagram to a problem with an ugly denominator. He showed operators a tool that suggests which networks might be their providers, then gave the count: of roughly 1,100 networks in Internet2's customer cone, only two in the Internet2-only portion had created ASPAs the previous week. That was his April 2026 snapshot, delivered at ARIN's public meeting, not a current tally. Internet2 describes him as its director of routing integrity. The person responsible for persuading research networks to make these authorizations could see the distance between a usable screen and a signed object.

The screen matters. Wallace's experimental ASPA Planner takes daily refreshed AS-relationship data and routing observations, sketches likely upstream providers and offers a candidate authorization. In his original keynote transcript, he said it had worked well in tests near network edges; deeper in the core, the suggestions were less consistent. A graph that looks tidy to an executive can still misclassify a peer as a provider. State of Oregon operator Alison Wood said she had sent the diagrams for her own AS to her executives during the talk. That is a real gain in legibility. It also puts the decision in front of people who may mistake a line on a screen for a verified commercial relationship.

Wallace demonstrated a second, quieter trap with his ROA Planner. It combines current routes with historical routing and IRR objects. A school may shift an announcement to another network once a year; a disaster-recovery site or DDoS scrubbing provider may appear only when needed. A ROA planned from today's table alone can make tomorrow's legitimate route invalid. ARIN's official keynote account describes the planner and visualizer as tools for operators making that choice, not automatic signers.

The April mismatch was visible in another measure: Wallace put ASPA-covered address space at about 0.3% for the Internet2 community and 33% for GÉANT. Those are shares of address space, while the two-of-1,100 comparison counts networks. A later dated deployment table and audited provider suggestions would show how much the planners changed. The immediate lesson is operational: a proposed graph is cheap; the network that signs an authorization owns its consequences.