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Is it possible to programmatically tell whether an ASN belongs to a hosting company/ISP or to an "ordinary" organization?

I know it's possible to look up the whois and check the org-name property, but that doesn't really help as this requires some research to determine what the company actually does, and I'm trying to solve this programmatically.

I tried looking for hints at the ripe API documentation but couldn't find any.

Thanks.

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You can't tell, there's no such distinction in the RIPE database.

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  • Maybe there is something that can imply of the organization type indirectly? like the number of ASNs it has, who assigned it the ASN etc.
    – Yuval
    Oct 1 '17 at 7:18
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    I really doubt that. The simple thing is that it’s not relevant for the assignment of ASNs, and that there really isn’t any distinction technically between an ISP and a ‘ordinary‘ company. The majority of the LIRs have only one ASN, so that won’t help you either. Peeringdb mentioned by Ron Royston may be your best option, but networks can chose what data they want to enter there.
    – Teun Vink ♦
    Oct 1 '17 at 8:55
  • Got it, thanks! would upvote but can't upvote comments yet.
    – Yuval
    Oct 1 '17 at 20:59
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Try Peering DB. They include a parameter named "network type". This appears to provide the info you are looking for.

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  • Thank you for the reference but I tried a couple of organizations I needed and couldn't seem to find them here...
    – Yuval
    Oct 1 '17 at 7:21
  • @Ron_Royston: Could you determine how they obtain their data? Labeling the information Network Type is misleading because there is a similarly named label. The "status" data element for IP addresses is sometimes labeled NetType, according to tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7485#page-11 . A simple query at whois.ripe.net will confirm this. It may not be the same data set as the one for an ASN, but it will cause confusion when the ARIN Database is queried.
    – user2964971
    Oct 1 '17 at 12:38
  • Apart from that, any tool is better than no tool.
    – user2964971
    Oct 1 '17 at 12:38
  • Networks can enter their own data.
    – Teun Vink ♦
    Oct 1 '17 at 15:13
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There are online databases and services available with this information, which associate IP-addresses, IP-address ranges or ASNs with the type of company that owns it. But it's unclear how accurate the info in those databases is. (They are probably all based on inferred data, since there doesn't seem to be an official Internet registry that list such information.) Some of the databases are free, some commercial. They allow access by either file downloads or by a query api service.

Below are some databases that I found. (I'm not affiliated in any way to them.)

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There is no public and up-to-date dataset available for free. There is huge classification work to know for what kind of usage type an ASN is (e.g. Business, Hosting, ISP).

If you are looking for an up-to-date solution with fair pricing, I suggest trying out Ipregistry. For any IP address, you can get the ASN it belongs to and know the usage type thanks to the field connection.type.

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  • Unfortunately, product or resource recommendations are explicitly off-topic here.
    – Ron Maupin ♦
    Aug 15 '20 at 21:02
  • Thanks, Ron for the information. However, I am quite surprised since 2 of the other answers are also product or resource recommendations but are there for months.
    – Laurent
    Aug 16 '20 at 7:18

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