AS16177 EQUENSWORLDLINE Via Zurigo, 3

Three generations of company name across fourteen blocks, and a street address from another country in the handle.

What it's used for

• A payment processor's network. Fourteen IPv4 prefixes announced from the Netherlands, no IPv6, five thousand six hundred and thirty-two addresses, through two observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Most blocks share one netname of country code, the middle-generation brand and a single date, so a large part of the holding was registered on one day.
• Two use the current merged brand with a legal form suffix, and three use the original brand followed by the letters for a local network and a two or three letter code, which names an internal segment rather than a company.
• Those three are registered to a technical contacts role carrying the middle-generation name, while everything else lists the current one, so the record holds all three eras at once.
• The AS handle is the current brand followed by a street name and a house number from a city in another country, which is where the parent group sits rather than where the blocks are announced.
• Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.

Interesting

• Payment processors carve their address space into named internal segments because the regulators want to know which systems touch card data. A netname describing a local network is an audit boundary that escaped into a public database.
• Two upstreams for a processor that clears a country's payments looks thin until you remember that its real connections are private lines to banks, invisible to routing.