AS10578 — GIGAPOP-NE

Network type: education

AS10578 announces 4 IPv4 prefixes covering 24,832 addresses and 5 IPv6 prefixes.

About this network

GIGAPOP-NE is registered to Harvard University but is not Harvard's campus network. It is the New England GigaPoP, operated as Northern Crossroads (NoX) — the regional research-and-education aggregation point for New England universities, with MIT and Harvard as anchor institutions and a membership running to a couple dozen colleges and research organisations.

What it's used for

The rDNS is the giveaway: the sampled address resolves to harvard-cps-nox300gw1.nox.org, a NoX gateway router, not a Harvard host. RIS sees 4 IPv4 prefixes carrying 24,832 addresses and 6 IPv6 prefixes, against 19 observed BGP neighbours.

That ratio is the whole story. Nineteen peers against a modest address count is not an eyeball network and not an enterprise — it is an aggregator. NoX exists to hand its member campuses shared upstream connectivity: Internet2 and national R&E backbones, commodity transit, and direct peering with large content networks, bought once at regional scale rather than a dozen times over. Traffic is university research and campus egress; the address space itself is mostly infrastructure.

Notable

Both IPv4 prefixes — 18.2.128.0/19 and 18.2.192.0/19 — sit inside 18.0.0.0/8, MIT's legacy Class A. The GigaPoP was numbered out of a member institution's historic block, which is why a multi-university regional network appears to live in MIT address space.

Interesting

One announced prefix, 2001:504:2e::/48, falls in ARIN's 2001:504::/32 range, which is reserved for exchange-point peering fabrics — the address-level fingerprint of an organisation that runs an interconnect, not just consumes one.

This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy.

Announced prefixes

• 18.2.0.0/19
• 18.2.128.0/19
• 18.2.192.0/19
• 192.5.89.0/24
• 2001:468:600::/40
• 2001:504:2e::/48
• 2603:40ff:2000::/36
• 2603:40ff:4000::/36
• 2603:40ff:6000::/36

Upstream networks

• AS174 Cogent Communications, LLC
• AS11164 Internet2
• AS11537 Internet2

Downstream networks

• AS1650 Cambridge Public Schools

Adjacent networks

• AS174 Cogent Communications, LLC
• AS11164 Internet2
• AS47065 USC / UFMG PEERING Research Testbed
• AS46887 Crown Castle Fiber LLC
• AS1650 Cambridge Public Schools
• AS11537 Internet2

Routing security

• RPKI: 1 valid, 0 invalid and 8 not-found announcements; 1 ROAs.
• ASPA: none published.
• IRR: 44% of announcements registered; 7 route objects.
• Listed in as-sets: AS-CTBC-CUSTOMERS116, AS-RCN-CE-PEERS, AS10578:AS-ALL, AS198949:AS-SD.

Internet exchanges

• Boston Internet Exchange — Boston, United States
• Massachusetts Internet Exchange — Boston, United States