AS10886 MAX-GIGAPOP

MAX-GIGAPOP is Mid-Atlantic Crossroads, the regional research and education network operated out of the University of Maryland. A "GigaPoP" is a shared high-capacity aggregation point, and that is exactly what this AS is.

What it's used for

Regional academic interconnection, not campus access. RIS shows 10 announced IPv4 prefixes with 10,240 addresses, 4 announced IPv6 prefixes, and 30 observed neighbours.

Thirty neighbours against ten thousand addresses is the whole story. Networks that small are normally single-homed edges; a network that peers with dozens of ASes while holding almost no address space is an aggregator, carrying other people's traffic between member institutions, national backbones such as Internet2, and commercial peers. The address space is infrastructure, not user pools.

The reverse DNS backs this up precisely. Sampled names include penn-state-re-demarc.maxgigapop.net, literally the demarcation point handed to a member university, umcp-atm.umd.edu on the Maryland campus side, and dia.static.tfhrc2.gov, a federal highway research facility. Universities and government research labs, connected through a shared exchange, is the definition of a GigaPoP.

Notable

The prefix list is a patchwork drawn from several different providers' space (65.113, 63.239, 38.124, 209.201), which is what happens when a regional exchange absorbs connections and address assignments from many upstreams over three decades.

Interesting

Among the announcements are 199.7.91.0/24 and 2001:500:2d::/48. Those blocks are home to d.root-servers.net, one of the thirteen DNS root servers, which the University of Maryland has operated since the earliest days of the root server system. A network of ten thousand addresses is quietly carrying a piece of the internet's naming foundation.