AS8877 LIRBG-AS

LIRBG-AS is held by Lir.bg EOOD, a Sofia company that describes itself in its own words as "an IP trading company". It sells and brokers IPv4 address space and runs LIR-registration and resource-management services for third parties inside the RIPE region.

What it's used for

Very little routing of its own. AS8877 originates a single /24 (78.128.0.0/24), and no PTRs came back on the addresses sampled inside it. The company's actual business is not carrying traffic. It is holding, transferring and administering address blocks on behalf of clients, and it states publicly that it manages one of the largest LIRs in Bulgaria.

Notable

• This is a deliberate, self-declared address broker, not a network operator that merely looks untidy. The usual caution about over-reading a scattered inventory does not apply here. The holder says what it is on its own front page.
• Even the one prefix it does announce is registered to a different organisation — the netname is Telehouse, held by Telehouse AD, not by Lir.bg. The reverse zone has no nameservers delegated at all. Registrant, announcer and end user are three separate parties, which is the normal state of affairs for brokered space.
• Blocks registered under Lir.bg's LIR are routed by whoever leased them, frequently under entirely unrelated ASNs in other countries. Prefixes appearing under this LIR must not be geolocated to Bulgaria or attributed to Lir.bg as an operator.
• Classified other with low confidence. An IP-leasing intermediary has no honest kind in a vocabulary built around what a network carries, because this one carries almost nothing.

Interesting

Address-leasing intermediaries are one of the main reasons registry data drifts away from reality after IPv4 exhaustion. The registrant of a block and the operator actually announcing it are increasingly different parties, and the RIR object rarely says so.