AS10653 MVANET

MVANET is USAi.net, Inc., a small independent Massachusetts service provider. The handle preserves the company's original name, MVA.NET, for the Merrimack Valley, the stretch of the Merrimack river north of Boston where it started as a dial-up and web-hosting ISP in the late 1990s. It now runs out of Haverhill and sells fixed wireless and fibre connectivity, colocation and hosting, mostly around the Boston area.

What it's used for

The AS announces a single IPv4 prefix, 216.236.240.0/20, totalling 4,096 addresses, no IPv6, and RIS sees one observed neighbour.

One neighbour is the decisive number. Whatever the company sells, in the routing table it is a single-homed stub: it buys transit from one upstream and originates one legacy block. It provides no transit to anyone else, so despite being an ISP by trade this AS sits at the edge of the internet, not in its middle.

A /20 is a plausible size for a provider of this kind. It is enough to number a few thousand customer endpoints, hosted servers and colocated machines, and nowhere near enough to run a mass-market broadband business.

Notable

The card stops short of saying what fraction of the block is access customers versus hosted and colocated machines, because the evidence does not settle it: reverse DNS returned nothing on the addresses sampled, and that is a sample, not a finding. An operator that sells business connectivity, wireless access, colocation and web hosting out of one small legacy /20 is genuinely mixed, and the honest answer is that the inventory here cannot be split.

The survival of the MVANET handle is the interesting part. It is a fossil of a 1997 regional dial-up ISP, still originating its original address block nearly three decades later, after most of its contemporaries were bought or shut down.