AS10972 NF-CANET2

NF-CANET2 is registered to Memorial University of Newfoundland as the Newfoundland gigaPOP for CA*net 2, the second-generation Canadian national research and education backbone. It exists as an interconnect point in the research-network topology rather than as a network that carries its own address space.

What it's used for

The routing tells an unusual but coherent story: RIS observes no originated prefixes at all (0 IPv4, 0 IPv6) yet 4 observed neighbours. The AS is present in the BGP graph without announcing any space of its own. That is exactly the shape of a gigaPOP or regional interconnect AS: its job is to be an aggregation and peering point where a province's universities and research institutions meet the national NREN backbone, with the actual address space originated by the member institutions' own ASes.

CA*net 2 was the mid-to-late-1990s CANARIE-operated national research backbone, built as a set of regional gigaPOPs (one per province or region) rather than a single flat network. Memorial University, as the province's principal research institution, took the Newfoundland and Labrador gigaPOP role, and this ASN is the artifact of that architecture.

Notable

• An AS with zero originated prefixes and non-zero neighbours is genuinely rare and often mistaken for a dormant or unrouted number. This one is not dormant: it is participating in the routing graph, just not as an origin.
• Because it announces nothing, this AS cannot be geolocated or sized from routing data. The country here comes from the registration, not from the inventory.