AS8789 NOV-AS

NOV-AS is now registered to Telefónica Tech Northern Ireland Limited. The handle is the clue to what it actually is: NOV is Novosco, the Belfast managed-cloud and IT-services firm founded in 2007.

What it's used for

Managed hosting and private cloud for enterprise and public-sector customers — Novosco was best known for running infrastructure for NHS trusts, councils and financial services across Northern Ireland, Ireland and the north of England. The AS announces a single 90.155.112.0/20 (about 4,100 addresses) with one observed BGP neighbour: a service provider's own hosting estate behind one upstream, not a carrier network. No PTRs were returned on the addresses sampled, so the internal naming could not be examined.

Notable

The ownership chain is unusually busy for a network this small:

• Novosco was acquired by the German IT group CANCOM in 2019 for around £70m.
• CANCOM sold its UK & Ireland arm to Telefónica Tech in 2021 for roughly €398m, moving the Belfast business to the Spanish group.

The registry object has followed the money; the AS handle has not, which is why the network still carries the name of a company that no longer exists.

Interesting

The prefix first appears in the routing table in 2011, well after the AS number's low value would suggest. Low AS numbers say when a number was issued, not when the current holder started using it — a caution that applies to this whole range.