AS11601 PICANOC-AS

PICANOC-AS is Réseau Picanoc.net Inc., a rural broadband network in western Quebec built as a public/private venture between the MRC de Pontiac, the MRC de la Vallée-de-la-Gatineau and the region's school boards to reach communities the incumbent carriers skipped.

What it's used for

Regional last-mile internet access for homes, businesses and public institutions across the Pontiac and Vallée-de-la-Gatineau county municipalities, north-west of Gatineau. The routing footprint matches that description exactly: two announced v4 prefixes, 5,120 addresses, no IPv6, and a single observed BGP neighbour. One upstream and a five-figure address count is the shape of an access network that buys transit and hands the addresses to end users, not of anything wholesale.

Notable

The prefix registrants section is the interesting part, and it is an exoneration rather than a red flag. 68.171.64.0/20 — the larger of the two blocks — is registered not to Picanoc but to the Western Quebec School Board, and the sampled reverse DNS on it resolves to mapnet.wqsb.qc.ca. That looks like third-party space until you know the network's origin story: the school boards were founding partners in the venture, so the AS carrying a partner institution's own registered block is corporate history, not address brokerage. The smaller 162.223.44.0/22 is registered to Picanoc itself.

Interesting

The split is a neat illustration of a rule this dataset keeps re-learning: a registrant that differs from the announcing holder is only suspicious when the registrants are unrelated. Here they are the same project.