AS11350 NORTHWESTERN-MEDICAL-CENTER

NORTHWESTERN-MEDICAL-CENTER is NorthWestern Medical Center, a community hospital in St. Albans, Vermont. Despite the low AS number this is a recycled ASN — ARIN registered it to the hospital in September 2017 — so it carries no early-internet history.

What it's used for

A single-site healthcare enterprise network. RIS sees one v4 prefix, 256 addresses, no IPv6, and 2 observed neighbours. That is about as small as a routed AS gets: the hospital holds one /24 and multi-homes it across two upstreams. The reason a 256-address organisation bothers with BGP at all is provider independence — clinical systems, electronic health records, imaging exchanges and payer connections cannot tolerate renumbering, and dual upstreams on portable space let the hospital survive one carrier failing without changing an address. Two neighbours confirms it is a leaf network: nothing transits through it.

Notable

The prefix 216.57.112.0/24 is registered to NorthWestern Medical Center itself under the handle NMC-113 — first-party registration with no third-party registrants in the inventory, which rules out any leased-space reading. The addresses sampled returned no reverse DNS, but that is a two-address sample and supports no inference either way.

Interesting

The name invites the obvious confusion with Northwestern Medicine, the large Chicago academic health system. They are unrelated: ARIN puts this holder at 133 Fairfield Street in St. Albans, a Vermont hospital serving Franklin and Grand Isle counties. It is a good example of why a familiar-looking name has to be cleared against the registered address before it is believed.