AS11157 ELAB

ELAB is the AS of Electronic Laboratory Services (Pty) Ltd, registered with AFRINIC at 21 Napier Road, Richmond, Johannesburg. Its contacts sit across two domains — @elab.co.za and @lancet.co.za — placing it inside the Lancet Laboratories pathology group, whose laboratory information systems it supports.

What it's used for

A single corporate edge. RIS observes one announced IPv4 prefix, 196.3.151.0/24 (256 addresses), no IPv6, and one BGP neighbour. A lone /24 behind a single upstream is an enterprise's own presence on the internet: enough space for public-facing services and remote access into a private network, and nothing like the inventory or the peering breadth of a provider. The prefix is registered to ORG-ELSC1-AFRINIC, the company's own AFRINIC org handle, so this is first-party space rather than something borrowed or leased.

Notable

The name is a good example of why handles need checking rather than reading. ELAB sounds like it could be a research or education network; the AFRINIC record shows a South African commercial company in the clinical-pathology business. The correct classification follows the registered organisation and its contacts, not the suggestive abbreviation.

Interesting

Despite a low AS number, AFRINIC's registration date for AS11157 is 2005, and the address block is AFRINIC 196/8 space — so nothing here is a legacy 1990s network, and there is no reason to attach any /8-based geographic or historical inference to it. Reverse DNS returned nothing on the two addresses sampled, which is a sample and supports no conclusion either way.