AS8978 ASN-HOLYSEE Holy See Secretariat of State Department of Telecommunications

ASN-HOLYSEE is the network of the Holy See / Vatican City State, operated by the Secretariat of State's Department of Telecommunications from the Palazzo del Belvedere inside Vatican City.

What it's used for

• The internet connectivity of the Vatican itself: the Roman Curia, the Holy See's dicasteries and media operations, and the institutions attached to them. It is effectively a sovereign state's national network, in miniature.
• Reverse DNS on the announced space resolves into Vatican-controlled zones such as ias.va (its internet-access service) and service.va, alongside customer-style names of the form cust-IP-ADDR.ias.va.
• A second block resolves into pusc.it, the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, an example of the ecclesiastical institutions numbered out of this space.

Notable

• Government address space, not commercial: the holder is a state telecommunications department, and the network exists to serve the Church's central administration rather than to sell access.
• The footprint is tiny by national standards (roughly 9,000 IPv4 addresses across two prefixes plus an IPv6 /32), but it is well connected, peering at multiple exchanges.

Interesting

• Vatican City is one of the smallest territories on the internet to run its own AS and its own country-code TLD (.va), and this ASN is the whole of it.