AS593

AS593 is a legacy autonomous system registered in the RIPE database under the handle EASINET-AS1, with a maintainer object (ERX-AS593-MNT) whose name signals an Early Registration Transfer — a migration of a pre-RIPE-NCC registration into RIPE's modern database rather than a fresh assignment. The record's only descriptive text is a terse remark, "Easinet Air Base Cern, Geneva CH," which points toward EASInet, the early-1990s European academic/supercomputing backbone that IBM funded under its EASI (European Academic Supercomputer Initiative) programme. EASInet linked European research and supercomputing sites to each other and to NSFNET in the United States via a 1.5 Mbps transatlantic circuit terminating at CERN in Geneva, and is credited alongside EBONE as one of the origins of the pan-European Internet. No org: object or corporate successor claims the ASN today, and every routing data source consulted agrees the number is currently unrouted: zero announced IPv4/IPv6 prefixes, zero RIS peer visibility out of 326/322 sampled peers, and a CAIDA customer cone of exactly one ASN (itself). The ASN is formally RDAP status "active" but functionally dormant — allocated and on file, not operating a live network. No abuse or security signal was found in Spamhaus, NANOG, or GreyNoise sources, consistent with an inactive registration rather than a clean operating network.

RIR / status

RIPE NCC; RDAP status "active"; mnt-by ERX-AS593-MNT (legacy/Early-Registration-Transfer bucket, not a direct RIPE NCC issuance) [Confirmed] — https://rest.db.ripe.net/ripe/aut-num/AS593.json

Operator / legal entity

Unknown — no org: object on the aut-num record; historically associated with the EASInet project consortium (CERN, GMD, IBM, and European academic/supercomputing partners funding a transatlantic academic backbone, early 1990s), but no current legal successor is confirmed to hold the registration [Likely] — https://cerncourier.com/a/gigabits-the-grid-and-the-guinness-book-of-records/, https://pal.anderssen.ch/NetHistorics/TCPHIST.html

Allocated (RIR registration event)

2002-08-21 (RIPE RDAP autnum top-level "registration" event); last changed 2017-11-15 [Confirmed] — https://rdap.db.ripe.net/autnum/593

Website / peering policy

Unknown — no live operator website, PeeringDB record, or published peering policy found under any name variant (EASInet, Easinet Air Base) [Unknown]

Abuse contact / security signal

no abuse contact on file (RIPEstat abuse-contact-finder returned empty); no notable public abuse or threat-feed mention found in Spamhaus ASN-DROP resources, NANOG archives, or GreyNoise as of 2026-07-17

Network & routing

Network type

historical academic/research backbone (EASInet, ~1990-era); not an active commercial ISP, hosting, or enterprise network today [Likely] — https://cerncourier.com/a/gigabits-the-grid-and-the-guinness-book-of-records/

Routing status

0 IPv4 prefixes, 0 IPv6 prefixes announced; 0/326 RIS peers see it in IPv4, 0/322 in IPv6; CAIDA asnDegree total 0 (customer 0, peer 0, provider 0) [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/593, https://api.asrank.caida.org/v2/restful/asns/593

CAIDA AS rank / customer cone

rank 79,459; cone = singleton (1 ASN, 0 prefixes, 0 addresses) [Confirmed] — https://api.asrank.caida.org/v2/restful/asns/593

RPKI posture

not assessable — no announced prefixes exist to validate, and RIPEstat's rpki-validation call was skipped upstream for lack of a prefix argument [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/593

Geo footprint

CAIDA reports a placeholder region code "EU" with lat/long 0,0 (not a real coordinate); the RIPE remark names Geneva, Switzerland, but that text is unverified free-form description, not a geolocation field [Unknown] — https://rdap.db.ripe.net/autnum/593

ASN / registry name

AS593 / EASINET-AS1 [Confirmed] — https://rdap.db.ripe.net/autnum/593

Notable historical usage

EASInet is credited as one of Europe's earliest international TCP/IP academic backbones, linking European supercomputing sites to NSFNET via a 1.5 Mbps CERN-Geneva transatlantic circuit; CERN's own account describes becoming Europe's largest Internet site partly through this link circa 1990 [Likely] — https://cerncourier.com/a/gigabits-the-grid-and-the-guinness-book-of-records/, https://pal.anderssen.ch/NetHistorics/TCPHIST.html

Community corroboration

no NANOG, Reddit, or operator-forum mentions found; consistent with a dormant, unannounced ASN [Confirmed as a sourced null result] — https://archive.nanog.org/list/archives.html, https://bgp.he.net/report/peers