AS7640 CITICNET China International Trust & Investment Corporation Management Information Center

CITICNET is the CITIC Group, formerly the China International Trust & Investment Corporation. Founded in 1979, it is one of China's largest state-owned conglomerates, spanning financial services, manufacturing, materials, consumer businesses and urban development. AS7640 is registered to the group's management information department.

What it's used for

• Corporate networking for the group. The AS announces a single /20 out of 210.73.96.0/19, an APNIC block whose registry entry reads CITICNET / CITIC Group Management Information Department, for roughly 4,000 IPv4 addresses.
• This is a conglomerate's in-house IT network, not a service provider. There are no customer allocations under it and no subscriber-style reverse DNS.

Notable

• Enterprise address space. An address here belongs to the corporate estate of a very large company, so it is more likely to be an office, a corporate server or an outbound proxy than a home or datacentre host.
• The address block is a legacy APNIC allocation held directly by the company rather than assigned by a Chinese carrier, which is the mark of an organisation that was on the internet early and large enough to want its own routing.

Interesting

• The Management Information Center in the registry description is the group's internal IT function. Its presence in the AS name is a reminder that this AS was registered for the company's own use, and that the CITIC banking, securities and industrial subsidiaries the public knows run under their own separate networks.