AS11478 OPENFACE

OPENFACE is the Montreal network of Beanfield Technologies Inc. Beanfield, founded in 1988, operates one of the largest independent fibre networks in Toronto; it entered Montreal in February 2020 by acquiring Openface Inc., a fibre and point-to-point wireless operator with roughly 100 km of owned fibre and a couple of hundred on-net buildings. The AS number, the handle and the netnames all still carry the acquired company's identity. It announces three IPv4 prefixes (16,384 addresses) plus an IPv6 /32, with one observed BGP neighbour.

What it's used for

Metro fibre access in greater Montreal, sold mainly to small and medium businesses and enterprise tenants of the buildings Beanfield lights. The reverse DNS shows both halves of that. Most sampled addresses carry generated first-party names — 216-46-0-5.beanfield.net, 66-171-160-5.beanfield.net — the ordinary rDNS an access provider publishes across its subscriber ranges. One address instead resolves to mail-in.adhoc-recherche.com, a customer's own mail host, which is precisely what a building-tenant business does with a static address on its provider's block.

Notable

All three prefixes register to org Beanfield Technologies Inc., under netnames BEANFIELD-MTL-01, -09 and -12. The MTL naming confirms this is the Montreal footprint specifically, kept distinct from Beanfield's Toronto assets, and the registrant matching the holder rules out any leased-space reading of the Openface-versus-Beanfield name mismatch.

Interesting

This is a clean example of a handle naming a company that no longer exists as an independent business. OPENFACE looks like an unfamiliar operator until the acquisition is traced; the routing, the registry org and the rDNS domain have all moved to Beanfield while the AS handle stayed behind.