AS9983 ABS-AS-AP Australian Bureau of Statistics.

AS9983 (ABS-AS-AP) is held by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia's national statistical agency, which sits in the Treasury portfolio and is responsible for the national Census and the country's official economic and social statistics. The AS carries the agency's own network. Its address space, 144.53.0.0/16, is registered to ABS in APNIC as a portable allocation.

What it's used for

RIS sees 4 announced IPv4 prefixes covering 65,536 addresses and only 1 observed BGP neighbour, with no IPv6. The four prefixes are really one: the 144.53.0.0/16 aggregate, plus three /24s from inside it (144.53.243.0/24, 144.53.244.0/24, 144.53.254.0/24) announced separately, which is the standard way of steering specific services onto a particular path or provider while keeping the covering aggregate in place.

A full /16 with a single BGP neighbour is a very government-agency shape: a large legacy allocation from an era when a national agency could take a class B, single-homed today because the connectivity is bought from a provider (or a whole-of-government network) rather than peered. The address count says nothing about how many machines are live — most of a /16 like this is unused or used internally.

Notable

• ABS is the agency behind the Australian Census; its public-facing capacity has been under public scrutiny before, notably around online Census delivery.
• The lack of any announced IPv6 is notable for a Commonwealth agency, given long-standing federal IPv6 policy ambitions.