AS3496 Maraven

Maraven was one of the three operating affiliates of PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.), the Venezuelan state oil company. AS3496 is the legacy autonomous system registered to it, still carrying a Caracas (Chuao) address in the registry.

What it's used for

The AS anchors a small corporate allocation, roughly two /24s of legacy IPv4 space out of 200.1.168.0/22. It is enterprise address space rather than a service-provider network: no downstream customers, a single upstream relationship, and only a handful of hosts visible in it.

Notable

• Corporate, not eyeball. Addresses here belong to an oil-company network, so they read as business infrastructure rather than residential or hosting IPs.
• Legacy registration. The AS number and the surrounding 200.1.x space were handed out under ARIN in the mid-1990s, before LACNIC existed to serve Latin America, so the records remain in ARIN's registry rather than the regional one.
• The holder no longer exists as a company. Maraven ceased operations at the end of 1997 when PDVSA dissolved its operating affiliates (Maraven, Lagoven and Corpoven) and folded their assets directly into the parent. The registry name is a survivor of that era.

Interesting

Maraven was the successor to Shell's Venezuelan operations, created when the country nationalized its oil industry in the mid-1970s and split the foreign concessions into state-owned affiliates. The AS number outlasted the brand by nearly three decades.