Autonomous system
AS3856 PCH-AS
Unclassified ARIN Educational/Research
Summary
Packet Clearing House
research legacy
Packet Clearing House (PCH-AS), the non-profit research institute that supports internet exchange points and critical DNS infrastructure worldwide.
What it's used for
- Operating route collectors and route servers at internet exchange points, and running anycast DNS service used by top-level domains.
- Only 256 IPv4 addresses — a tiny allocation whose importance is wildly out of proportion to its size, because anycast lets the same small block appear in many places at once.
Notable
- This is infrastructure, not an ISP or an enterprise: there are no subscribers behind it. Addresses here are servers that other networks depend on.
- PCH is one of the longest-running sources of public data on internet exchange points and interdomain routing, and its route-collector archives are widely used in research.
Interesting
- Because the prefix is anycast, a traceroute to a PCH address can end in a completely different country depending on where you start — geolocating this ASN to a single place is meaningless by design.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
Recorded at 346 exchanges in 139 countries, largest first.
| Exchange | Location | Their address |
|---|---|---|
| IX.br (PTT.br) São Paulo | São Paulo, Brazil | 187.16.216.19 |
| OpenIXP Internet exchange Point | Jakarta, Indonesia | 218.100.36.109 |
| 4b42 Internet Exchange Point | Zurich, Switzerland | 185.1.125.143 |
| DE-CIX Frankfurt | Frankfurt, Germany | 80.81.195.42 |
| Indonesian Internet Exchange (IIX-Jakarta) | Jakarta, Indonesia | 123.108.9.19 |
| LINX LON1 | London, United Kingdom | 195.66.225.239 |
| AMS-IX Amsterdam | Amsterdam, Netherlands | 80.249.209.250 |
| Rotterdam Internet eXchange | Rotterdam, Netherlands | 91.194.218.90 |
Transit providers
53 upstream, 0 downstream and 81 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-13, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 1 prefixes · 256 addresses IPv6 1 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| US | United States of America | 2 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- ARIN
- Handle
AS3856- Registry name
- PCH-AS
- Registrant
- Packet Clearing House, Inc.
- Abuse contact
- abuse@pch.net
- Registered
- 1994-09-26
- Last changed
- 2012-02-24
- Allocation
- assigned
Declared
PeeringDB profile
- Name
- PCH AS3856
- Also known as
- PCH, WoodyNet
- Network type
- Educational/Research
- Scope
- Global
- Traffic ratio
- Balanced
- Peering policy
- Open
- IRR as-set
RADB::AS-PCH- Present at
- 324 exchanges
- Facilities
- 5 facilities
- Website
- https://pch.net
PeeringDB records are maintained by the network operator and are not independently verified. Treat them as a statement of intent rather than of fact. For the observed and recorded view, see peering, which lists the exchanges Packet Clearing House has a port on file for.
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 100% valid · 2 valid, 0 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 2 authorising AS3856
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 2 of 2 announcements
- Route objects
- 2 naming AS3856
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 436 networks and 1,771 prefixes, as published 2026-10-13. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere