AS8978 — ASN-HOLYSEE Holy See Secretariat of State Department of Telecommunications

AS8978 announces 6 IPv4 prefixes covering 8,960 addresses and 1 IPv6 prefixes.

About this network

ASN-HOLYSEE is the network of the Holy See / Vatican City State, operated by the Secretariat of State's Department of Telecommunications from the Palazzo del Belvedere inside Vatican City.

What it's used for

• The internet connectivity of the Vatican itself: the Roman Curia, the Holy See's dicasteries and media operations, and the institutions attached to them. It is effectively a sovereign state's national network, in miniature.
• Reverse DNS on the announced space resolves into Vatican-controlled zones such as ias.va (its internet-access service) and service.va, alongside customer-style names of the form cust-IP-ADDR.ias.va.
• A second block resolves into pusc.it, the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, an example of the ecclesiastical institutions numbered out of this space.

Notable

• Government address space, not commercial: the holder is a state telecommunications department, and the network exists to serve the Church's central administration rather than to sell access.
• The footprint is tiny by national standards (roughly 9,000 IPv4 addresses across two prefixes plus an IPv6 /32), but it is well connected, peering at multiple exchanges.

Interesting

• Vatican City is one of the smallest territories on the internet to run its own AS and its own country-code TLD (.va), and this ASN is the whole of it.

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

Announced prefixes

• 193.43.128.0/22
• 212.77.0.0/21
• 212.77.9.0/24
• 212.77.10.0/23
• 212.77.12.0/22
• 212.77.16.0/20
• 2a01:b8::/32

Upstream networks

• AS12874 Fastweb SpA
• AS3356 Level 3 Parent, LLC
• AS174 Cogent Communications, LLC
• AS137 Consortium GARR
• AS6762 TELECOM ITALIA SPARKLE S.p.A.
• AS31543 myNet GmbH
• AS8218 Zayo Infrastructure France SA
• AS24482 SG.GS
• AS57463 NetIX Communications JSC
• AS59919 Brainbox S.r.l.

Downstream networks

• AS61160 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

Adjacent networks

• AS61160 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
• AS3356 Level 3 Parent, LLC
• AS12874 Fastweb SpA
• AS174 Cogent Communications, LLC
• AS137 Consortium GARR
• AS6762 TELECOM ITALIA SPARKLE S.p.A.
• AS6939 Hurricane Electric LLC
• AS31543 myNet GmbH
• AS24482 SG.GS
• AS8218 Zayo Infrastructure France SA
• AS57463 NetIX Communications JSC
• AS59919 Brainbox S.r.l.

Internet exchanges

• Milan Internet Exchange — Milan, Italy
• Roma Internet Exchange Point — Rome, Italy