AS10946 ASN-NTF

ASN-NTF belongs to Network Time Foundation, the US non-profit that stewards the Network Time Protocol reference implementation and related open-source timekeeping projects. It is a very small autonomous system: RIS sees 2 announced IPv4 prefixes covering 1,024 addresses, no IPv6, and 1 observed neighbour.

What it's used for

A single upstream and a thousand addresses is the profile of an organisation that runs its own service infrastructure and buys transit from one provider, rather than one that sells connectivity to anyone else. Network Time Foundation exists to fund and maintain the NTP codebase and the surrounding ecosystem, and the numbering resources here support the foundation's own project infrastructure. No PTRs came back on the handful of addresses sampled, which tells us nothing either way about how the space is delegated, so the routing shape rather than reverse DNS is what carries the description.

Notable

Both announced prefixes sit in the same 104.152.84.0/22, with a /24 announced from inside it. That is a fairly ordinary bit of hygiene, keeping a more-specific route available independently of the covering aggregate.

Interesting

The organisation's importance is wildly out of proportion to its footprint on the routing table. NTP is one of the oldest protocols still in daily use on the internet, and the foundation that maintains it holds fewer addresses than a mid-sized office network.