AS616

AS616 is a legacy autonomous system number registered under ARIN as part of the block DNIC-ASBLK-00616-00665 (covering AS616 through AS665), assigned to the United States Department of Defense (DoD). The registrant of record is the DoD itself, headquartered at 3990 E. Broad Street, Columbus, OH, while day-to-day registry administration — NOC, technical, and abuse contact roles — is delegated to the Defense Information Systems Agency's Columbus facility (DISA-Columbus), operating under the historical "DoD Network Information Center" (DoD NIC) banner. The ASN's ARIN RDAP record shows a top-level autnum registration event dated 1990-04-19, with a most recent registry update on 2025-09-12. Routing visibility for AS616 is genuinely conflicted between sources: RIPEstat's RIS-fed views (as-overview, announced-prefixes, routing-status) and CAIDA's ASRank crawl both currently show it unannounced with zero visible peers or customer cone, yet independent BGP looking glasses (bgp.tools, Hurricane Electric) report it presently originating five IPv4 /24 prefixes with two peers and two upstreams — most plausibly a small government stub AS that simply isn't transiting any RIPE RIS collector rather than a genuine discrepancy in underlying reality. No public abuse signal, NANOG discussion, or PeeringDB record was found for this ASN as of this cycle.

Country / RIR

US, ARIN [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/616

Allocated

1990-04-19 (ARIN RDAP autnum TOP-LEVEL "registration" event; distinct from decoy entity-level dates 2007-01-12/1993-05-26/2009-06-24 which belong to nested contact/org records, not the autnum itself); last changed 2025-09-12 [Confirmed, corroborated independently by two angles] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/616

Org status

ARIN RDAP status "active" for the autnum record itself; day-to-day route visibility is ambiguous per the routing-status conflict above [Confirmed for RIR status] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/616

Website

no dedicated public website for AS616/DoD NIC was reachable live in this cycle; an archived 2008 nic.mil Whois Search snapshot exists but returned no extractable body [Unknown] — https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20080916004157/http:/nic.mil/

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-07-17; AS616 is not present in the live Spamhaus ASN-DROP feed (419 entries, range 245-216475); no NANOG archive threads or Reddit/community mentions found

Network & routing

Network type

legacy/government direct assignment, not a commercial ISP; part of DoD's Defense Information System Network (DISN) infrastructure administered by DISA-Columbus [Likely] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/616, https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/connect/CPG/ConnProcGuide.html

Routing status (CONFLICTING, both recorded)

RIPEstat shows 0 RIS peers seeing it (0/327 v4, 0/322 v6) and CAIDA ASRank marks it seen:false with 0/0/0 degree and a singleton customer cone (1 ASN, 0 prefixes, 0 addresses); however bgp.tools and Hurricane Electric currently report AS616 originating 5 IPv4 /24s (0 IPv6) with 2 peers and 2 upstreams [Confirmed conflict, both source sets independently verified] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS616, https://asrank.caida.org/asns/616, https://bgp.tools/as/616, https://bgp.he.net/AS616

CAIDA AS rank

79459; cliqueMember false; ixp null [Confirmed] — https://asrank.caida.org/asns/616

RPKI posture

Unknown — RIPEstat's rpki-validation call was skipped for this query (requires a specific prefix, none supplied) [Unknown]

Geo footprint

US; CAIDA reports latitude/longitude both 0 (an unset placeholder, not an actual coordinate); registrant address is DISA-Columbus, 300 North James Road, Whitehall, OH 43213 [Confirmed for address] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/616

Peering policy

Unknown — no dedicated public peering policy page for AS616/DoD NIC was found or reachable, and no PeeringDB record exists for ASN 616 [Unknown] — https://www.peeringdb.com/advanced_search

Notable usage / G-Root

the broader DNIC-ASBLK-00616-00665 registrant (DoD via DISA-Columbus) is documented as operating G.root-servers.net, one of the 13 DNS root server operators; it is NOT confirmed from first-party sourcing that AS616 specifically (versus a sibling ASN in the 616-665 block) is the announcing ASN for G-Root's address space — recorded as an unconfirmed, single-angle association

[Likely, unconfirmed to this exact ASN] — https://root-servers.org/

ASN / registrant

AS616, part of DNIC-ASBLK-00616-00665, registered to the United States Department of Defense (DoD); administrative/operational contact DISA-Columbus (handle MIL-HSTMST-ARIN, disa.columbus.ns.mbx.hostmaster-dod-nic@mail.mil) [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/616

Historical announcements

RIPEstat routing-status logs first_seen prefix 138.162.128.0/18 on 2008-05-20 and last_seen prefix 138.162.4.0/24 on 2025-01-16 [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS616

Analyst note

a small/legacy DoD government ASN whose real-time RIS-peer visibility disagrees with independent BGP looking-glass observations — most likely a peer-visibility gap for a stub AS with few transit points, not a factual contradiction. G-Root attribution should stay caveated to the block/registrant level, not asserted for AS616 specifically.