AS10025 IUSN-AS-AP The IUSN Foundation

IUSN-AS-AP is The IUSN Foundation — the Internet Users Society of Niue — the non-profit that has provided internet service to the Pacific island nation of Niue since 1997. Niue has a population of around 1,700 people, and IUSN has been its internet presence for the better part of thirty years.

What it's used for

The island's internet access. The AS announces 5 IPv4 prefixes totalling 1,024 addresses and no IPv6 — and the five prefixes are really one: 202.59.4.0/22 plus each of its four constituent /24s announced separately, so the entire network is a single /22. Sampled reverse DNS sits under niue.nu: KANIU-202-59-6-5.niue.nu, KANIU-202-59-7-133.niue.nu (address-encoded labels of the sort used for end-user equipment) and open5.niue.nu / open133.niue.nu, whose "open" naming is consistent with the public-access side of the service.

Notable

An eyeball network, and about as small as one gets. 1 observed BGP neighbour means a single upstream and no peering — Niue reaches the rest of the internet through one link. A /22 for an entire country is an unusual thing to see in a routing table, and it is a fair proxy for the scale of the place.

Interesting

IUSN was funded by the .nu top-level domain, which IANA delegated to it in 1997. .nu means "now" in Swedish and Dutch and became a popular commercial TLD, and that revenue paid for internet service on Niue — which for years was marketed as the world's first free nationwide Wi-Fi country. Administration of .nu passed to Sweden's Internet Foundation in 2013; IUSN kept operating the network.