AS16353 MERULA UK Routing

Five companies' blocks, one netname convention, and one reverse name that forgot to include a domain.

What it's used for

• A provider's network. Twenty-five prefixes announced from the United Kingdom, four of them IPv6, twenty-two thousand and sixteen addresses, through fifty observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• The sampled blocks are registered to five different companies. Six belong to the holder; the rest belong to a connectivity firm, a communications company, a regional subsidiary and a southern operator.
• Every one of them uses the same netname scheme: a country code, the registrant's own brand, and a full date. The convention belongs to the registry, not to any of the five.
• Four blocks share one date, which makes them a single allocation recorded four times.
• Eight of eighteen queried addresses answered, in four different styles across four domains. One uses hyphens between the address numbers, one keeps the dots, one drops the last number entirely, and one is a word rather than an address.
• One answer has no domain at all: two letters, a hyphen, and the four numbers of the address, ending there. It is a hostname with nothing to attach it to.
• Two of the domains belong to the holder. One belongs to a third-party reverse-DNS service whose name says so.

Interesting

• Carrying other companies' address space is how a small provider stays useful after its own allocations run out. The netname scheme survives every acquisition because the registry form asks the same question.