AS11045 STERLING

STERLING is Sterling Communications, Inc., a business-focused telecom and IT provider based on SW Sequoia Parkway in Portland, Oregon. It announces 38 IPv4 prefixes totalling roughly 10,000 addresses plus one IPv6 /32, and is seen with only three BGP neighbours.

What it's used for

Sterling sells connectivity, VoIP telephony, hosted desktops, cloud services and colocation to businesses in the Pacific Northwest, and the AS is the transport layer under all of it. The reverse DNS reflects that mix directly: some addresses carry Sterling's own infrastructure names under sterling.net, while others carry customer organisations' own domains — a non-profit's gateway and a transport company's hostname among the sampled addresses. Space that wears the customer's name rather than the provider's is the fingerprint of assigned business blocks and colocated equipment, not of a consumer access pool.

Notable

The prefix registrants are all Sterling's own handles — STERLING-INTERNET, STERLING-A, NETBLK-STERLING-BLK — so despite the untidy shape (a /20, a /21 and a long tail of /24s carved out of it), this is self-registered space, not leased or brokered address inventory. Three observed neighbours confirms the role: a small number of upstreams, no peering fabric, nothing wholesale.

Interesting

The prefix list is dominated by /24s that sit inside the announced 206.72.96.0/20 and 199.34.232.0/21. Deaggregating a covering block into its component /24s like this is usually done to steer inbound traffic per-customer across different upstreams, which is a common pattern for a provider whose customers each want their own multi-homed behaviour.