AS11840 VGRS-REGISTRY-AS

VGRS-REGISTRY-AS is one of Verisign's operational networks. Verisign runs the

.com and .net registries and the DNS infrastructure behind them, and this AS

carries the company's own service estate rather than anything sold as hosting to

third parties.

What it's used for

• Verisign-operated servers and service infrastructure. RIS observes roughly 21 IPv4 prefixes carrying about 5,400 addresses, plus nine IPv6 /48s from 2620:74::/32, against six observed neighbours. Every announced IPv4 prefix is a /24, scattered across several ARIN parents (199.16.80.0-ish, 209.131.16x, 216.87.x, 72.13.x, 64.6.x), which is what an anycast and multi-site service network looks like: many small, independently placeable blocks rather than one large aggregate.
• The sampled reverse DNS is entirely first-party verisign.com, with site-coded load balancer and router names. Those are datacenter service hosts, not user access lines.

Notable

• All the registrant names are Verisign's own corporate entities: Verisign Inc., VeriSign Infrastructure & Operations, and VeriSign Global Registry Services. Three different org names on one company's inventory is intra-group history, not third-party space, and the rDNS confirms the operator.
• Small address counts belie the importance of the space. Registry and DNS workloads need reach and redundancy, not address volume, so a critical piece of internet infrastructure can sit inside a few thousand addresses.

Interesting

• The VGRS handle predates the current branding: it stands for VeriSign Global Registry Services, the arm that ran the .com/.net registry business.