AS8518 RFERL Radio Free Europe

RFERL is the network of RFE/RL, Inc. — Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty,

the international broadcaster headquartered in Prague and funded by the U.S.

Congress through the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It is a corporation, not a

government department, but it is a public-service broadcaster rather than a

commercial one.

What it's used for

• Publishing infrastructure for RFE/RL's language services: web origins, mail, firewalls, content-management systems and the sites of its regional brands.
• Roughly 8,400 addresses across a scattered set of RIPE and ARIN blocks (91.102.96.0/21, 193.111.128.0/21, 149.7.244.0/22, 94.198.112.0/22 and neighbours), reflecting a newsroom that must stay reachable from many countries.

Notable

• rDNS is first-party and revealing: rferl.org and rferl.net corporate hosts, plus per-service origin servers such as morigin-kz.azattyq.org (the Kazakh service, Azattyq) and morigin.voapashto.org — Voice of America's Pashto service is hosted in the same infrastructure, the two USAGM broadcasters sharing a delivery platform.
• The space carries servers, not subscribers: no dynamic, DSL or eyeball naming appears anywhere in it.

Interesting

• Because RFE/RL's audiences are in countries where its sites are frequently blocked, the network's design priorities are censorship resistance and origin redundancy, which is why so small an address footprint is split across so many separate prefixes and upstreams.