AS11078 BROWN

BROWN is Brown University, the Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island. This is one of the cases where the obvious reading is the correct one, and the evidence lines up on every axis: ARIN registrant, address space, and reverse DNS all say the same thing.

What it's used for

The campus network. AS11078 announces seven IPv4 prefixes totalling 65,792 addresses, and one IPv6 block, 2620:6e:6000::/48. Six of the seven v4 prefixes are pieces of 128.148.0.0/16 — a full legacy Class B — deaggregated into a /17, a /18, a /19, a /20 and two /21s, all registered in ARIN to BROWN-UNIV. The seventh, 192.91.235.0/24, is registered to BROWN-TEST.

That deaggregation pattern is characteristic of a university: a single historical block carved into contiguous pieces so that different parts of the estate — academic departments, residential halls, research groups, administration — can be routed and filtered separately. The sampled reverse DNS, cardamom.cs.brown.edu, drops straight into the computer science department, which is what campus space looks like from the outside: named hosts under a departmental subdomain rather than the numbered subscriber pools of an ISP.

Notable

Only one observed BGP neighbour despite 65k addresses. Address count and role are decoupled here — a university of this size is a large consumer of connectivity, not a seller of it. In New England, campuses typically reach the commodity internet and Internet2 through a regional research-and-education network rather than by building their own peering fabric, and a single visible upstream in RIS is consistent with that.

Interesting

128.148.0.0/16 is 65,536 addresses handed to one campus, an allocation from an era when address space was granted on institutional standing rather than demonstrated need. The BROWN-TEST /24 is the kind of small side-block a research university keeps for exactly what its name suggests.