AS12654 RIPE-NCC-RIS-AS Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre RIPE NCC

The beacon network: prefixes announced and withdrawn on a schedule so the rest of the Internet can be measured against them.

What it's used for

• Routing measurement. 5,776 addresses in 16 IPv4 prefixes, 28 IPv6 prefixes, and 153 observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Every block carries the netname RIPE-NCC-RIS-BEACON.
• The IPv4 announcements include a /25 at 93.175.154.0 and a /28 at 93.175.154.128, both far longer than the /24 most operators will accept.
• The IPv6 announcements range from /46 down to a single /64 at 2001:7fb:fb01:200::/64.
• First seen in routing data in October 2002.
• Eighteen sampled addresses were queried and none returned a name.

Interesting

• A beacon is a prefix that is announced and withdrawn on a fixed, published timetable. Because the schedule is known in advance, anyone watching BGP can measure exactly how long an update takes to propagate, which paths it takes, and where it is filtered. The prefix carries no traffic; the announcement itself is the payload.
• That is why the sizes look wrong. A /28 and a bare /64 exist to find out who accepts them, and the answer maps the filtering policies of the whole Internet without asking anyone.
• This is the system that produces the first-seen dates in every other entry of this kind. Records only start where the collectors started, so the earliest date the archive can show is a property of this network's history rather than of the networks it observes.
• 153 neighbours for a network that serves no users is a measurement platform peering as widely as it can, because each additional peer is another vantage point.