AS16504 GRANITE

A quarter of a million addresses, seventy-three announcements, and not one reverse name among the eighteen sampled.

What it's used for

• A business telecommunications provider's network. Seventy-three prefixes announced from the United States, twelve of them IPv6, two hundred and thirty-nine thousand three hundred and sixty addresses, through twenty observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• The registered blocks use two netnames. Most carry the brand cut to five letters and a two-digit numeral; a handful carry the full brand and a numeral one.
• Both schemes point at the same company, which is the registrant on every block. The truncation is the only difference between them, and it splits the holding in two for anyone sorting by name.
• The blocks come from many separate parent ranges at every size from the largest in common use down to small fragments, which is the signature of address space acquired piece by piece rather than allocated.
• Twenty observed neighbours is a wide spread, and the newer addressing is routed as seriously as the older.
• Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.

Interesting

• Silence in reverse DNS at this scale is a decision rather than an oversight. A provider selling to businesses has customers who bring their own names, so the blocks stay anonymous until somebody wants otherwise.
• Truncating a brand to fit a field and then not truncating it in later records is how one company becomes two in any database that groups by string. The addresses are one network; the paperwork reads as two.