Autonomous system
AS3856 PCH-AS
Unclassified ARIN
IPv4 addresses
256
1 prefixes
IPv6 prefixes
1
counted as prefixes, not addresses
Countries
1
mostly US
Flagged prefixes
0
none
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.
Address space
Summary
| 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
- Status
- active
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
Threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere