AS11355 SHELL

SHELL is Shell Information Technology International, Inc. — the IT arm of the Shell oil and gas group, registered in the United States. This is a genuine case of a famous name being what it appears to be, and the prefix registrants are what confirm it.

What it's used for

Corporate enterprise networking for a global energy company: offices, refineries, trading floors, and the internet-facing edge of Shell's internal systems. RIS sees 12 v4 prefixes / 67,840 addresses, no IPv6, and 3 observed neighbours. The address count is large but the neighbour count is tiny, and that combination is the signature of a big enterprise, not a carrier — a wholesale network with 67,000 addresses would peer with hundreds of ASes. Nothing transits through this AS; it announces Shell's own space and terminates it.

Notable

Nearly the whole inventory is the legacy 134.163.0.0/16 (handle SHELL2-SRE), with the rest carved from 138.57/138.58 space under SHELL1-SER — all registered directly to Shell Information Technology International. One prefix breaks the pattern in an instructive way: 193.189.55.0/24 registers in AFRINIC to the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria. Two RIRs and two differently named registrants would be a warning sign in isolation, but both are Shell operating companies, and intra-group registration across regions is real corporate history, not brokered space.

Interesting

The /16 at 134.163.0.0 is the kind of allocation only an organisation that was on the internet early could still be sitting on, and Shell has kept it whole rather than fragmenting it. The reverse DNS sample returned nothing on the twenty addresses probed, which is a sample rather than a finding and supports no conclusion either way about the zone.