AS8660 MATRIX-AS

MATRIX-AS is held by Italiaonline S.p.A., the Milan-based internet company

behind Italy's two big consumer web portals, Virgilio and Libero. The

handle preserves Matrix S.p.A., the company that built and ran Virgilio before

the merger that created Italiaonline.

What it's used for

• Serving Italiaonline's own web properties: the Virgilio and Libero portals, their webmail platforms, search, news and advertising systems. Public portal hostnames resolve directly into this AS's 212.48.0.0/19 and 213.209.0.0/18 blocks.
• About 28,700 IPv4 addresses across 15 prefixes.

Notable

• 343 observed BGP neighbours — enormous for a network of this size, and the single most telling number here. Italiaonline peers very widely so that Italian eyeball networks reach its portals and mailboxes directly. That is content-side peering, not transit sales.
• No PTRs were returned on the addresses sampled. That is not proof the zones are undelegated; it means the forward DNS (portal hostnames landing in this space) is what identifies the content, rather than reverse DNS.
• Libero began life as a consumer dial-up ISP, and the name still reads that way, but this AS carries the content and mail platform rather than subscriber access. It should not be geolocated as Italian residential space.