Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a file in which I have records as follows
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
2-sister-birmbb-s0005.ftip002590790.vpn-nte.bt.net BRI0 0 0 0
aber-con-dyce-s0006.ftip002732992.vpn-nte.bt.net ATM0 0 0 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first row is a router name. I want the count of these router names.
wc -l filename gives me the count of line in the file but, on some lines these router names are repeated. So actually i want the count of unique router names in the file. How can I do that?

Regards,
Rahul.

nawk '! ($1 in arr) {cnt++;arr[$1]} END {printf("routers->[%d]\n", cnt)}' myFile

sort -u filename | wc -l

In my understanding you need soln to have a count for each occurance of a router name. As you have file f1 as below :
-------------
r
p
q
p
p
-------------

sort f1 | uniq -c - will produce o/p as below :

3 p
1 q
1 r