AS10430 WA-K20

WA-K20 is the Washington State K-20 Telecommunications Network, a

state-funded education backbone launched in 1996 that connects K-12 school

districts, community and technical colleges, public universities and libraries

across Washington.

What it's used for

• Aggregating and carrying Internet and inter-campus traffic for the state's whole education sector — "K-20" meaning kindergarten through post-graduate.
• Providing a shared, subsidised path to the commodity Internet (via the Pacific Northwest GigaPOP) so individual districts and colleges don't each have to buy their own transit.

Notable

• Education, and structurally a small R&E backbone rather than an end-site. RIS sees 69 IPv4 prefixes carrying roughly 587,264 addresses plus one IPv6 /32 (2607:fa78::/32), with 27 observed BGP neighbours.
• Read those numbers together. Twenty-seven neighbours is far too few for a commercial carrier, which would peer with hundreds — but it is far more than the two or three a single campus keeps. That middle band is characteristic of a regional aggregator: it has downstream members as well as upstreams.
• The prefix list is the other tell. 164.116.0.0/16, 134.39.0.0/16, 168.99.0.0/16 and 168.212.0.0/16 are legacy institutional Class Bs, sitting alongside a long tail of /17s and /19s. That mix is what accumulates when separately-allocated member institutions are gathered under one origin AS over three decades — not what a single organisation is assigned in one go.

Interesting

• Networks like this exist because bulk-buying transit for an entire state's schools is dramatically cheaper than each district negotiating alone.