AS11320 LIGHTEDGE-AS-02

LIGHTEDGE-AS-02 is LightEdge Solutions, the Des Moines, Iowa colocation, private-cloud and managed-services provider. It began life in 1996 as Lighthouse Communications, and the reverse DNS still remembers: sampled addresses in its own 216.81.128.0/17 come back under lh.net.

What it's used for

Multi-tenant hosting. RIS sees 115 IPv4 prefixes, 312,576 addresses, 15 IPv6 prefixes and 41 observed neighbours. Forty-one neighbours is the number that separates this from every enterprise in the neighbouring AS range: it is far too many for a company buying transit for itself, and far too few for a wholesale backbone. It is the peering profile of a regional data-centre operator that connects to several carriers and exchanges at each of its sites and then resells that connectivity to the tenants in its cages.

The rDNS confirms what the space carries, and it is customers, not the operator: dhcpclient5.co.marshall.ia.us (an Iowa county government), atlantic5.snyder-assoc.com, san-srv-exc.enterpriseinformatics.com — a mix of local government, professional-services firms and enterprise mail servers sitting on hosted address space.

Notable

The prefix registrants read like a merger list, and that is exactly what they are. 147.203.0.0/16 is registered to ALPHAREL/optigraphics, a San Diego company, and its rDNS points at americanis.net; 206.251.233.0/24 is registered to American Internet Services. AIS — founded 1989, rebranded NFINIT in 2020 and San Diego's largest colocation operator — was acquired by LightEdge in April 2022, which is how a Des Moines provider ends up announcing legacy San Diego space. Likewise the onr.com PTRs on 207.200.0.0/18: OnRamp, the Austin colocation provider LightEdge bought in 2018. Third-party-looking registrants that are actually acquisitions are the most common false positive in this data, and this AS is a clean example of it.