Route Views is a project founded by the University of Oregon to allow Internet users to view global BGP routing information from the perspective of other locations around the internet. Originally created to help Internet Service Providers determine how their network prefixes were viewed by others in order to debug and optimise access to their network, Route Views is now used for a range of other purposes such as academic research.

Route Views servers get their information by peering

Peering

In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the customers of each network. The pure definition of peering is settlement-free or "sender keeps all," meaning that neither party pays the...

 directly with other BGP routers, typically at large IXPs

Internet Exchange Point

An Internet exchange point is a physical infrastructure through which Internet service providers exchange Internet traffic between their networks . IXPs reduce the portion of an ISP's traffic which must be delivered via their upstream transit providers, thereby reducing the average per-bit...

. The servers can be accessed via telnet

TELNET

Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...

 or SSH

Secure Shell

Secure Shell is a network protocol for secure data communication, remote shell services or command execution and other secure network services between two networked computers that it connects via a secure channel over an insecure network: a server and a client...

.