Summary

  • The IRR as-set attributed to AS17494 expands to 2,115 autonomous systems, but an as-set is a routing filter, not a customer contract.
  • Observed-adjacency tools disagree by an order of magnitude on how many upstreams the network has — roughly six to eight in some views, about seventy in another — and the registry's 2021 declared transit list omits every dominant observed upstream.
  • Self-reported peering fields exist, but one of them is off by four orders of magnitude and the descriptive fields date to January 2023.

The entity operating AS17494 is registered with APNIC under the as-name BTTB-AS-AP, in an object whose description line reads "Telecom Operator & Internet Service Provider as well" and whose organisation field still names the Bangladesh Telegraph & Telephone Board; that object was last modified on 18 January 2021 (https://records.ping.pe/whois/AS17494). PeeringDB, the industry's self-registration database, attributes the same ASN to Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited. The prior BTW record on this network is available in the directory entry for this operator (https://btw.media/en/directory/telecom-operator-internet-service-provider-as-well).

The layer that looks most authoritative is also the least contractual. bgp.tools expands the IRR as-set AS17494:AS-CUSTOMERS to 2,115 autonomous systems covering 235,967 IPv4 prefixes and 141,241 IPv6 prefixes, including Bangladeshi members such as AS9230, AS24342, AS23923 and AS23688 and nested sub-sets such as AS-FGL and AS-BDHUB; the same set is itself nested inside NTT's as2914:as-asia, Arelion's as1299:as-twelve99-ap and Bharti Airtel's as9498:as-bharti-in sets (https://bgp.tools/as-set/APNIC::as17494:as-customers). That as-set is exactly what a network engineer pastes into a route filter, and it is the mechanism by which the claim travels: membership is self-asserted by whoever maintains the objects, can be stale, and can be over-inclusive long after a relationship has ended.

Observed adjacency gives a different and much smaller picture, but not a consistent one. records.ping.pe reports 70 upstreams, 116 peers and 62 downstreams for the ASN, with AS9498 (Bharti Airtel) the most frequently observed adjacent network by a wide margin at 23,055 sightings, ahead of AS2914 (NTT) at 2,794 and AS6453 (Tata) at 2,246 (https://records.ping.pe/peers/AS17494). BGPView, working from its own observations, reports 32 prefixes, 94 peers and only 7 IPv4 plus 4 IPv6 upstreams, while listing peers that span regional access networks such as AS24389 (GrameenPhone) and AS24432 (TM International Bangladesh) and global carriers such as AS174 (Cogent), AS1299, AS2914 and AS6453 (https://bgpview.io/asn/17494). IPinfo lists roughly 50 downstreams mixing Bangladeshi access networks such as AS9230 (Bangladesh Online) and AS17469 (Access Telecom BD) with global networks such as AS14789 (Cloudflare) and AS21859 (Zenlayer) (https://ipinfo.io/AS17494). Every one of those numbers is an inference from AS-path adjacency, and each tool decides for itself what counts as an upstream, a peer or a downstream.

The registry's declared policy is narrower still. The same January 2021 object defines the operator's import and export policy against five transit ASNs only — AS3491, AS7374, AS5400, AS702 and AS6762 — while the dominant observed transit paths run through AS2914, AS6453, AS9498 and AS7018, none of which appears in that declaration (https://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS17494&view=6447). CIDR Report classifies the ASN as both origin and transit, with 81,664 addresses originated and 148,992 in transit, and warns explicitly that its upstream and downstream labels describe topology relative to one collection point, not provider, customer or peer relationships.

Self-reported data is the third layer, and it is the least internally consistent. PeeringDB records 500–1000 Gbps of traffic, a heavy-inbound ratio, Asia Pacific scope, "never via route servers", and public peering at AMS-IX, DE-CIX Mumbai, Equinix Singapore and LINX LON1 — alongside self-reported totals of 500,000 IPv4 prefixes and 50,000 IPv6 prefixes against a routed reality in the tens. The record's descriptive fields were last updated on 26 January 2023, its public peering information on 24 April 2026, and its contact information on 27 February 2021 (https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/17494).

Prefix and address counts from independent observers converge far more than the relationship counts do, which is the useful asymmetry in this record. Hurricane Electric's toolkit shows 49 originated prefixes and 729 announced, 388 peers and 75,520 originated IPv4 addresses (https://bgp.he.net/AS17494). netstats.gr, working from RIPEstat-derived measurements, sees 38 routed prefixes (https://netstats.gr/as/17494). Whisper's directory reports 38 announced prefixes and 117 BGP neighbours with a neutral reputation score (https://canon.whisper.security/asn/17494). Roughly 75,000 IPv4 addresses is a figure three independent services agree on; no two agree on who is buying transit.

Route-origin validation shows the same dispersion. Hurricane Electric reports 37 valid and 12 invalid RPKI-originated entries, 11 of the invalid ones IPv6. netstats.gr reports 95% RPKI coverage — 139,500 of 147,200 routed addresses valid — with zero invalid prefixes, route objects registered for 66% of prefixes (25 of 38) and a hygiene score of 56 out of 100, with 26.3% of prefixes unregistered and 18.4% showing an IRR origin mismatch. Qrator Radar publishes sampled prefixes as valid with matching route objects and visibility between 83% and 100% (https://radar.qrator.net/as/17494/connectivity/prefixes).

The physical footprint is the most verifiable part of the record, because exchanges publish their own member lists rather than relying on operator self-report. Euro-IX's IXPDB lists the ASN's exchange presence (https://ixpdb.euro-ix.net/en/explore/asn/17494/ixps/), and the Internet Society's IXP tracker documents the exchange used in this record (https://pulse.internetsociety.org/en/ixp-tracker/ixp/987/).

Assembled, the evidence supports the "operator" half of the description and leaves the "internet service provider" half unproven in any contractual sense. The ASN is continuously routed, originates a few dozen prefixes, carries other networks' routes and appears at four international exchanges. What no public layer shows is which attached network buys transit, at what price, under what terms, or whether the relationship is still current. A counterparty that filters on the as-set inherits 2,115 unverified relationships; one that filters on observed adjacency inherits a number that changes with the tool and the hour.