AS5609 ASN-CSELT # AS-CSELT CONVERTED TO ASN-CSELT FOR RPSL COMPLIANCE

ASN-CSELT is the autonomous system of CSELT — Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni, the Turin research centre of the Italian incumbent telco, later renamed Telecom Italia Lab. The registration today sits with Telecom Italia S.p.A., and the AS announces a single legacy block, 163.162.0.0/16.

What it's used for

Corporate and research address space inside the Telecom Italia group. One flat /16 (65,536 addresses) announced as a single prefix — the signature of an institutional network that was allocated its space in one piece and never needed to fragment it.

Notable

This is the incumbent's lab and corporate AS, not the eyeball network that serves Italian broadband subscribers. Addresses here should not be read as consumer access, despite the holder being the country's largest telco.

Interesting

The full AS name in the registry — "AS-CSELT CONVERTED TO ASN-CSELT FOR RPSL COMPLIANCE" — is a fossil of the mid-1990s migration to RPSL, when object names had to be reshaped to fit the new syntax and the old name was pasted into the field as a note. Nobody has cleaned it up in thirty years.