AS16371 ACENS_AS Spain Hosting, housing and VPN services

The AS handle is not a label. It is a country, a comma, and a list of the three services on offer.

What it's used for

• A hosting provider's network. Fifty-three prefixes announced from Spain, one of them IPv6, eighty-nine thousand three hundred and forty-four addresses, through ten observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• The AS handle joins the brand to the letters for an autonomous system with an underscore, then adds a country and three services separated by commas. It reads as advertising copy.
• Most blocks use a country code, the brand, and a full date, with dates spread over seven years.
• Two use the brand alone. One is named after a national carrier instead, and is registered to that carrier's administrators and technical staff.
• The abuse contact splits by family. The dated blocks name the company itself; the undated ones and the carrier's block name a fourth brand's abuse team.
• The same three contacts appear on most blocks in two different orders, so the listing order is not meaningful.
• Five of eighteen queried addresses answered. Three carry the address hyphenated, a word for networks, and the provider's domain. Two are customer machines on unrelated domains, one of which begins with a number.

Interesting

• Selling hosting means somebody else's hostnames live on your addresses. Two answers in this sample name a mail server and a directory server on domains the registry has never heard of.
• A registry handle used as a sales pitch dates from when these fields were read by humans. Nothing validates it, so it survives.