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

• AS54617 Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, Inc
• AS11499 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• AS1650 Cambridge Public Schools
• AS156 Northeastern University
• AS14512 Bentley University

Adjacent networks

• AS11164 Internet2
• AS174 Cogent Communications, LLC
• AS11537 Internet2
• AS54617 Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, Inc
• AS11499 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• AS1650 Cambridge Public Schools
• AS156 Northeastern University
• AS14512 Bentley University

Internet exchanges

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