AS8501 PIONIER-AS PIONIER, National Research and Education Network in Poland

PIONIER-AS is the autonomous system of PIONIER, the Polish Optical Internet

national research and education network. The AS is registered to the Institute of

Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, whose Poznań

Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) operates the network.

What it's used for

• The national backbone linking Poland's academic city networks (MANs), universities, institutes and supercomputing centres to each other, to GÉANT and to the commercial internet.
• Carrying research traffic for large collaborations, grid/HPC projects and national e-infrastructure services run out of PSNC.

Notable

• The IPv4 footprint is small for an NREN — roughly 1,800 addresses in a handful of 212.191.x /24s, plus one IPv6 block. That is because this AS numbers the backbone itself; member universities and MANs hold their own address space and their own AS numbers, and reach the internet through PIONIER.
• rDNS is almost entirely router naming under rtr.pionier.gov.pl — hostnames encode the link endpoints between city gateways (Poznań, Łódź, Kraków, Białystok, Bydgoszcz, Kielce, Częstochowa). There are no subscriber pools at all: this is infrastructure address space.
• A few addresses in the range resolve to Akamai cache appliances, the usual arrangement of a research network hosting a CDN node on-net for its members.

Interesting

• The .gov.pl domain in the router names reflects PIONIER's status as state-funded national infrastructure rather than a commercial carrier.