AS11395 THIEL-AS

THIEL-AS belongs to Thiel College, a small private liberal-arts college in Greenville, Pennsylvania. The network is about as small as a routed AS gets: a single /24 (198.178.162.0/24, 256 addresses) and three observed BGP neighbours.

What it's used for

Campus networking for one college. The /24 is registered in ARIN as THIEL-IP4 directly to Thiel College, so the organisation that announces the space is the organisation that holds it. There is no second-party registrant anywhere in the inventory, which rules out the leased-space and proxy-network shapes that a lone /24 behind a low AS number can otherwise hide.

A campus of Thiel's size needs a public /24 for exactly the things a college puts on the public internet: web and portal front ends, mail, VPN concentrators for staff, and NAT egress for the campus wireless and residence-hall networks. The address count is far too small to be handing public addresses to end users directly.

Notable

Three neighbours against 256 addresses is the signature of a multihomed end site. The AS number exists so the college can hold its own address space and change or add upstreams without renumbering, which for a school is usually driven by moving between a state research-and-education network and a commercial ISP. It is a consumer of transit, never a provider of it.

No PTRs were returned for the two addresses sampled. That is a sample of two, not a finding about the zone, and nothing here is built on it.