AS16284 Inq-Digital-Nigeria-AS

Thirty-six blocks, one netname between them, and it holds a predecessor's initials.

What it's used for

• A provider's network. Fifty-two prefixes announced from Nigeria, sixteen of them IPv6, twenty-six thousand six hundred and twenty-four addresses, through sixteen observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Every sampled block carries the same netname, and it is not a name but a registry organisation handle: three letters for organisation, three initials, a serial number, and the registry's own name appended.
• Those initials match nothing in the record. The company that holds the blocks now has different ones, so the handle preserves whoever registered the organisation first.
• The holder field is the company name, a hyphen, and the company name again, identical on both sides.
• Sixteen IPv6 prefixes against thirty-six IPv4 blocks is a heavy commitment to the newer protocol for a network this size.
• One of eighteen queried addresses answered, and the name belongs to an educational institution's domain rather than to the provider, so the one published name describes a customer.
• The IPv4 blocks are scattered across three unrelated ranges, in sizes from four thousand addresses down to five hundred and twelve.

Interesting

• An organisation handle used as a netname for every block is the registry filling in a field nobody bothered with. It is unique and correct and tells a reader nothing, thirty-six times over.
• A provider whose only visible hostname is a university is serving institutions rather than households.