AS6527 MASSACHUSETTS

MASSACHUSETTS is the network of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, administered by the state's central IT organisation in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

What it's used for

• Statewide government connectivity: executive-branch agencies, state services and the judiciary. The AS announces roughly 230,000 IPv4 addresses across a dozen-odd prefixes, including several legacy /16s.
• The netnames are unusually descriptive for a government network and reveal the functions directly: MASSCOURTS for the judicial system and MASS-DR for disaster-recovery addressing.

Notable

• A US state government running its own AS with six figures of address space is a substantial public-sector network, comparable in size to a mid-tier enterprise or a small ISP, and it consolidates many agencies behind one origin.
• The ARIN organisation record dates to 1991 and the ASN to 1996, so this is a genuine early allocation rather than a reissued low number.

Interesting

• Dedicating registry-visible address space to disaster recovery is a continuity-of-government artifact. Most enterprises do not label their DR estate in public whois.