AS11417 NIU

NIU is Northern Illinois University, the public research university in DeKalb, Illinois. It announces exactly one prefix, the university's own /16 at 131.156.0.0/16, worth 65,536 addresses, behind 4 observed BGP neighbours.

What it's used for

Campus networking for a university of roughly 15,000 students. The /16 is registered in ARIN as NIU-NET to Northern Illinois University, and it is the only thing this AS originates. A single classful-era /16 announced whole, with no deaggregation and no borrowed blocks, is the cleanest possible university signature: the school was allocated a large block in the early academic-internet era and has never needed to fragment or supplement it.

That /16 carries everything a campus puts on the network: academic and administrative systems, the library, research and lab machines, residence-hall and campus wireless clients, and public-facing web and mail. Universities of this vintage routinely still hand routable addresses to end hosts rather than NATing everything, which is why a 15,000-student school sits on 65,536 addresses without strain.

Notable

Four neighbours is the multihoming profile of a campus, not a carrier. Public universities in Illinois typically take transit from a state or regional research-and-education network alongside commercial upstreams, which is what a handful of adjacencies against a single /16 looks like. NIU sells no transit and originates nobody else's space.

No PTRs came back for the two addresses sampled. Two addresses out of 65,536 is a sample, not a finding, and no inference is drawn from it.