AS7653 MSMSL-AS-AP Morgan Stanley Management Service Shanghai Limited

MSMSL-AS-AP is Morgan Stanley Management Service (Shanghai) Limited, the Shanghai entity of the American investment bank Morgan Stanley. AS7653 is a corporate network, not a service provider.

What it's used for

• In-house connectivity for Morgan Stanley's Shanghai operation. The AS announces a single small block, 103.183.66.0/23, registered MSMSL-CN directly to the company through APNIC.
• Banks run their own ASNs so that a site can be multi-homed across carriers without depending on any one of them. That is the whole purpose here: a few hundred addresses, announced for resilience rather than reach.

Notable

• Enterprise address space. An address in AS7653 belongs to a bank's corporate estate. There are no customers, no subscribers and no hosting behind it, and it should never be read as Chinese consumer or datacentre space just because the registry country is CN.
• The block is a recent APNIC allocation out of 103.0.0.0/8, so the AS number and the addresses are of very different vintages: the number is a 1990s-era registration, the space is modern.

Interesting

• The low AS number is the interesting part. It is far older than the 103/8 addresses it now carries, which is a good illustration of why an AS number's age says nothing about the age of the prefixes underneath it.