Why Every Operator Should Own Its ASN

Many operators live inside someone else's routing policy. Your prefixes, their AS path. Your customers, their failover decisions. It works — until the day it doesn't, and you discover how little of your own network you actually control.

What changes when you own the AS

With their own autonomous systems — AS137491 for Peerex Networks and AS58689 for ICC Communication — our networks speak for themselves on the global routing table. We decide how our IPv4 and IPv6 space is announced, which upstreams carry which traffic, and how we fail over when a path degrades. Multi-homing stops being a contract clause and becomes an engineering choice.

The number is the easy part

The registry assigns an ASN quickly. For any operator moving onto its own AS, the migration is the real project: moving sessions to eBGP, announcing new address space, updating reverse DNS — and doing all of it without a single customer noticing.

There are two honest paths. Convert existing peering in place, or run parallel eBGP sessions and cut over prefix by prefix. Parallel costs more effort, but it keeps rollback one command away. Choose with your change window and your customers in mind, not your calendar.

Hygiene from day one

A new ASN is a rare chance to start clean: RPKI ROAs for every prefix, strict prefix filters on every session, IRR objects that match reality, and IPv6 treated as a first-class citizen rather than an afterthought. Routing security is cheapest when it is the default.

Why it matters beyond one company

Every operator that controls its own routing can peer locally, keep domestic traffic domestic and reduce dependence on a small number of international paths. That is better latency, better resilience and better economics — for customers and for the country's internet as a whole.