AS10569 Red CENIAInternet

Red CENIAInternet is the network of CENIAI (Centro Nacional de Intercambio Automatizado de Información) in Havana, the organisation that administered Cuba's first Internet connectivity and still holds the country's original address allocation.

What it's used for

The routing is unusually clean for a network this old: RIS observes exactly one IPv4 prefix carrying 65,536 addresses — 169.158.0.0/16, announced whole, with no deaggregation at all — plus a single IPv6 prefix, 2001:1340::/32. That /16 is Cuba's founding block, delegated to CENIAI in the mid-1990s, and it is still announced as one route thirty years later.

One observed BGP neighbour tells you this is not a carrier. CENIAI sits behind a single upstream and provides connectivity and hosting to Cuban institutions — scientific, academic, state and enterprise organisations — rather than selling transit onward. Cuba's mass-market and mobile subscribers ride ETECSA's networks, not this one, so the /16 is best read as institutional space: servers, mail, and organisational access rather than consumer eyeballs.

Notable

A country's entire early Internet presence in a single unsplit /16, behind a single peer, is a rare shape today. It reflects a network built when Cuba's connectivity was a single satellite-era link into a state research institution, and one that has never had commercial reasons to fragment.

Interesting

The block predates the RIR system's Latin American arm — it was assigned directly, before LACNIC existed, which is why a Cuban network sits in what looks like North American address space.