AS10546 MSSTATE

The campus ASN of Mississippi State University, the land-grant research university at Starkville. The handle MSSTATE matches the institution and the reverse DNS confirms it directly.

What it's used for

A large public university network. RIS sees 5 announced IPv4 prefixes carrying 73,216 addresses, no IPv6 in the observed set, and one observed neighbour. The anchor is 130.18.0.0/16, a full legacy Class B, with a set of 192.208.x blocks announced alongside it.

The rDNS puts the use beyond doubt. Sampled addresses in the 192.208 space answer as ws5-128.208.ext.dynamic.msstate.edu and similar: dynamic marks pooled, dynamically assigned client addresses, ws reads as workstation, and the whole name lives under msstate.edu. That is campus end-user space, the addresses handed to laptops, lab machines and dorm connections, held in the university's own zone rather than an upstream's.

Notable

Sixty-odd thousand addresses is a big footprint for a campus, and it comes from the era when a research university could be given an entire /16 on request. It is a legacy artefact, not a measure of current need.

The single observed neighbour is characteristic of university networking in the US: campuses connect upward through a state or regional research-and-education network rather than peering broadly on their own, so from the outside they look like a stub hanging off one provider.

Interesting

Mississippi State runs a substantial high-performance computing operation, so some of that space backs research infrastructure rather than ordinary campus traffic.