AS8518 — RFERL Radio Free Europe

Network type: hosting

AS8518 announces 6 IPv4 prefixes covering 8,448 addresses and 1 IPv6 prefixes.

About this network

RFERL is the network of RFE/RL, Inc. — Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, the international broadcaster headquartered in Prague and funded by the U.S. Congress through the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It is a corporation, not a government department, but it is a public-service broadcaster rather than a commercial one.

What it's used for

• Publishing infrastructure for RFE/RL's language services: web origins, mail, firewalls, content-management systems and the sites of its regional brands.
• Roughly 8,400 addresses across a scattered set of RIPE and ARIN blocks (91.102.96.0/21, 193.111.128.0/21, 149.7.244.0/22, 94.198.112.0/22 and neighbours), reflecting a newsroom that must stay reachable from many countries.

Notable

• rDNS is first-party and revealing: rferl.org and rferl.net corporate hosts, plus per-service origin servers such as morigin-kz.azattyq.org (the Kazakh service, Azattyq) and morigin.voapashto.org — Voice of America's Pashto service is hosted in the same infrastructure, the two USAGM broadcasters sharing a delivery platform.
• The space carries servers, not subscribers: no dynamic, DSL or eyeball naming appears anywhere in it.

Interesting

• Because RFE/RL's audiences are in countries where its sites are frequently blocked, the network's design priorities are censorship resistance and origin redundancy, which is why so small an address footprint is split across so many separate prefixes and upstreams.

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

Announced prefixes

• 91.102.96.0/21
• 94.198.112.0/21
• 149.7.244.0/22
• 149.7.248.0/24
• 185.45.56.0/22
• 193.111.128.0/21
• 2a01:538:2::/48

Upstream networks

• AS32787 Akamai Technologies, Inc.
• AS174 Cogent Communications, LLC
• AS29208 Quantcom, a.s.
• AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
• AS6939 Hurricane Electric LLC
• AS5610 O2 Czech Republic, a.s.

Adjacent networks

• AS32787 Akamai Technologies, Inc.
• AS174 Cogent Communications, LLC
• AS29208 Quantcom, a.s.
• AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
• AS6939 Hurricane Electric LLC
• AS5610 O2 Czech Republic, a.s.

Internet exchanges

• NIX.CZ - Neutral Internet eXchange for the Czech Republic — Prague, Czech Republic