Autonomous system
AS8021 PCNET
Unclassified APNIC
Summary
Paradigm Communications
legacy
PCNET — Paradigm Communications, Inc. of Cheshire, Connecticut, an internet service provider that registered this AS number with ARIN in 1996. Its dial-up and access customers, based around Hartford, were acquired by NETPLEX in September 2002, and what survives today is a vestigial routing presence.
What it's used for
- Unclear, honestly. The AS announces a single /24 (
208.24.198.0/24) with no reverse DNS on it, behind exactly one upstream: AS6062, NETPLEX — the very company that bought Paradigm's customer base.
Notable
- The /24 is not Paradigm's own address space. It sits inside
208.0.0.0/11, a Cogent Communications direct allocation, so it is provider-assigned space routed on a legacy AS number rather than a legacy address holding. - With no rDNS, no downstreams and one prefix, there is nothing in the inventory that honestly supports a kind label — access, hosting or otherwise. It is left unclassified rather than guessed at, and addresses in it should not be geolocated or typed from the holder's 1990s ISP identity.
- Name trap:
PCNEThere is Paradigm's oldpcnet.comdomain. It is unrelated to PCNet, Inc. of Trumbull, Connecticut, which holds the trademark, and unrelated to PCNet International of British Columbia. Paradigm's own former site says so explicitly.
Interesting
- A 1996 two-byte AS number, still announced, for one borrowed /24. Low AS numbers rarely die; they just get very quiet.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
No exchange port on file. Many exchanges publish no participant list, so this is not proof of absence.
Transit providers
1 upstream, 0 downstream and 1 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
| AS | Network | Paths seen |
|---|---|---|
| AS6062 | NETPLEX | 60 |
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-28, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 1 prefixes · 256 addresses IPv6 0 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| US | United States of America | 1 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- APNIC
- Handle
AS8021- Registry name
- PCNET
- Registrant
- Paradigm Communications Inc.
- Abuse contact
- rpinz@pcnet.com
- Registered
- 1996-08-27
- Last changed
- 1996-08-27
- Allocation
- assigned
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 0% valid · 0 valid, 1 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 0 authorising AS8021
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 1 of 1 announcements
- Route objects
- 1 naming AS8021
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 448 networks and 1,851 prefixes, as published 2026-10-29. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere