AS12331 — ORG-VA303-RIPE

AS12331 announces 1 IPv4 prefixes covering 65,536 addresses and 1 IPv6 prefixes.

About this network

The corporate network of Audi, the German car manufacturer.

What it's used for

• Corporate networking. 65,536 addresses, all of it a single legacy class B registered as NET-AUDI to the company's own RIPE administrators.

Notable

• The /16 is announced as five pieces rather than one: a /17, a /18, a /19 and two /20s, which add up to exactly the whole range and nothing more.
• Three observed BGP neighbours. A network holding 65,536 addresses and reaching the rest of the internet through three peers is an end site, not a carrier.
• One IPv6 prefix, a 2001:678:35c::/48, from the range RIPE reserves for provider-independent assignments — space that belongs to the holder rather than to whichever network happens to be announcing it.

Interesting

• Splitting a /16 into five announcements that reassemble into the original is usually about steering: each piece can be given a different path, so traffic for one part of the company arrives over a different link from another. The alternative, announcing the /16 whole, gives the operator no control over which of its three upstreams inbound traffic chooses.
• A manufacturer of this size runs plants, engineering and dealer systems on one address block, and the assembly line is the part with no tolerance for an outage: modern car production is scheduled to the minute, and stopping the line is measured in cars per hour not built.

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

Announced prefixes

• 143.164.0.0/16
• 2001:678:35c::/48

Upstream networks

• AS8220 COLT Technology Services Group Limited
• AS51402 COM-IN Telekommunikations GmbH
• AS5400 British Telecommunications Limited

Adjacent networks

• AS8220 COLT Technology Services Group Limited
• AS51402 COM-IN Telekommunikations GmbH
• AS5400 British Telecommunications Limited