AS292

AS292 is a legacy autonomous system number registered under ARIN to ESnet (the Energy Sciences Network), the U.S. Department of Energy's high-performance research and education backbone, which is operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) on behalf of the DOE Office of Science. The registry name is ESNET-WEST, and the registrant org handle is ENSN-Z, both pointing at the same Berkeley Lab address at 1 Cyclotron Road. ESnet is not a commercial ISP; it is federally funded science infrastructure that interconnects the DOE's national laboratories, user facilities, and major scientific instruments, carrying large-scale data flows for high-energy physics, genomics, and climate research. The triage point for AS292 is that it is a stub AS: every routing source consulted (RIPEstat, CAIDA AS Rank) agrees it announces a single IPv4 prefix, 198.128.0.0/14 (262,144 addresses), no IPv6, and has a CAIDA degree of exactly one — a single provider, zero peers, zero customers. RIPEstat observes one neighbour, and the route is near-universally visible (324 of 325 RIS peers). Operator documentation and third-party databases indicate AS292 routes through ESnet's primary, externally-peering ASN, AS293; AS292 (the "West" segment label) is a subordinate stub. The autnum top-level registration event dates the ASN to 1997-06-16, last changed 2012-04-02. RPKI posture is not assessable from the supplied data (RIPEstat rpki-validation was skipped, no prefix supplied). No notable public abuse signal was found as of June 2026 — CleanTalk reports a 0% spam rate, AS292 is absent from Spamhaus ASN-DROP and from ipapi.is's top-1000 abusive ASNs, and no NANOG abuse threads or CVE/malware attribution were found — consistent with a clean, professionally operated federal R&E network.

Operator

Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. DOE Office of Science (ARIN name ESNET-WEST, registrant ENSN-Z, Berkeley, CA) [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP, es.net/about

Country / RIR

US, ARIN [Confirmed] — RIPEstat abuse-contact-finder (authoritative_rir: arin), ARIN RDAP

Allocated

1997-06-16 (ARIN registry date from the autnum top-level events; NOT an IEEE date — IEEE publishes no ASN registration dates); last changed 2012-04-02 [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP autnum top-level events

Org status

U.S. federal research network infrastructure; steward LBNL, funded by the DOE Office of Science; ESnet officially formed 1986 with roots to a mid-1970s LLNL modem network [Confirmed] — es.net/about, es.net/about/esnet-history

Contacts

hostmaster@es.net, +1-510-486-7607; NOC trouble@es.net; peering peering@es.net; Berkeley Lab, 1 Cyclotron Road MS 59R3103, Berkeley, CA 94720 [Confirmed for hostmaster/RIR via RDAP; Likely for NOC/peering via es.net]

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-06-26 — CleanTalk 0% spam rate, absent from Spamhaus ASN-DROP and ipapi.is top-1000 abusive ASNs, no NANOG abuse threads, no CVE/malware attribution; minor observational IPinfo tags (BitTorrent DHT, one VPN endpoint) are low-severity and typical of a large R&E network

Network & routing

Network type

U.S. federal research and education (R&E) / government science backbone; not a commercial ISP [Confirmed] — es.net/about

Size

single IPv4 prefix 198.128.0.0/14 (262,144 addresses); 0 IPv6 prefixes; customer cone = 1 ASN (itself), 1 prefix, 262,144 addresses [Confirmed] — RIPEstat routing-status / announced-prefixes, CAIDA AS Rank

Routing/peering

announced — 324/325 RIS v4 peers see it, 0/323 v6; CAIDA degree total 1 (customer 0, peer 0, provider 1); RIPEstat observed_neighbours 1; CAIDA cliqueMember=true [Confirmed]. ESnet's documented peering policy (peering@es.net) is Selective and applies to its primary ASN AS293; AS292 is a stub that routes through AS293 [Likely for the AS292↔AS293 relationship per ipinfo/peeringdb]

RPKI

not assessable from supplied data — RIPEstat rpki-validation was skipped (no prefix supplied); status for 198.128.0.0/14 from AS292 not determinable here [Unknown]

Notable usage

carries DOE national-laboratory research traffic; ESnet overall (via AS293) interconnects 270+ research and commercial networks and operates at 400 Gbps–1.2 Tbps (ESnet6 generation), moving very large scientific datasets [Confirmed for ESnet overall] — es.net/about

Related ASNs

AS293 (ESnet's primary externally-peering ASN; AS292's single upstream/neighbour) [Likely] — ipinfo.io/AS292, peeringdb.com/org/1181

Analyst note

Encountered as a stub/legacy ASN under a major federal R&E operator. The RDAP nested entity events (2023-10-04 for the ENSN-Z org, 2010-01-22 for the org registration) are decoys; the ASN's own registration is the autnum top-level event, 1997-06-16. Live external peering runs under AS293, not AS292. Clean ASN.