AS16477 NCL-203-16477

Seventeen prefixes out of one parent range, every one of them carrying the same netname.

What it's used for

• A consumer research company's network. Seventeen IPv4 prefixes announced from the United States, no IPv6, eight thousand four hundred and forty-eight addresses, through sixteen observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Every announced block comes from the same parent range, and every one is registered under an identical netname: three initials and a three-digit numeral.
• The AS handle takes that netname and appends this network's own number, so the handle is the netname plus a fact the record already states.
• The blocks are scattered through the parent range at four different sizes, from the largest here down to the smallest routable one. They are not contiguous, so none of them can be merged.
• Sixteen observed neighbours for eight thousand addresses is an unusually wide spread of upstreams for a holding this small.
• Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.

Interesting

• One netname across seventeen registrations means the field was filled in once and copied. It identifies the company and nothing else, so the registry can say who holds a block but never which one.
• Many upstreams and few addresses is the shape of a network that needs to reach a lot of places rather than serve a lot of traffic. Connections are the product; capacity is not.
• Seventeen fragments of one range is a routing table entry per decision, and none of the decisions are visible from outside. Only the fragments are.