Willamette Sold Half Its 1992 /16. Only the Half It Kept Was on the Map.

Summary

• ARIN’s 4 November cumulative transfer original records a 3 November 19:28:39 UTC transfer from Willamette University to Medicus Labs, Inc. The original_set is 158.104.0.0–158.104.255.255; the transfer_set is its upper half, 158.104.128.0–158.104.255.255 (32,768 addresses). Exact ARIN RDAP now names Medicus on that /17 and Willamette on the lower /17. The university’s lower-half registration retains its 25 February 1992 date.

• RIPE NCC RIS’s 4 November 00:00 UTC exact-prefix views counted 0 of 322 full-table IPv4 peers seeing the transferred upper /17 and 322 of 322 seeing the retained lower /17. Its upper-half record lists a last-seen exact route in April 2014. These are RIS observations at a stated time and collector set.

• The 3 November 00:00 UTC RIS snapshot already showed the upper /17 at 0/322 peers, before ARIN recorded the transfer.

Two equal pieces, two different clocks

The transfer file is almost too tidy. One old /16 spans 65,536 addresses. The transfer extracts the upper 32,768 addresses, exactly half. The lower 32,768 remain registered to the university. This is the kind of transaction that tempts a dashboard to move a counter from one owner to another and call the story finished. The Internet is less obedient to a counter.

ARIN’s two current RDAP cards show the administrative cut. Medicus Labs has 158.104.128.0/17, with registration at 19:28:38 UTC on 3 November. Willamette has 158.104.0.0/17; its registration still carries the 1992 date, and its last-change event is stamped in the same second as the new card. The transfer-log event follows at 19:28:39. Those adjacent seconds describe record handling. A dated BGP or operator record would identify the router change.

RIS tells a sharply different second story. At 00:00 UTC on 4 November, the retained lower /17 was visible to all 322 full-table IPv4 peers in that sample, with AS29984 as the listed origin. The transferred upper /17 registered zero. A query at 00:00 UTC on 3 November also recorded zero for the upper half, before this transfer. RIS’s history fields put its last-seen exact route on 14 April 2014. The upper /17 was already absent from the daily sample before the transfer. It moved a registry claim over a half that had already been absent from this measured view for years.

That distinction matters to buyers, operators and anyone treating address inventory as active network capacity. Thirty-two thousand addresses on a receipt and thirty-two thousand addresses in observed routing are two different quantities. The lower half shows that the old university allocation still had a live routing footprint in this collector view. The upper half shows that a new registrant can receive a very large block while the immediate public routing picture stays blank. A later RIS exact-prefix or more-specific observation, together with an operator change record, would date any activation.

No price appears in ARIN’s public row. The file names the source, recipient, original interval, transferred interval, timestamp and resource-transfer type. It says enough to establish custody at the registry. A transaction agreement or operator plan would establish price or intended use. The concrete question is already demanding: when a thirty-four-year-old university /16 splits in two, which half is a paper asset at the next measurement, and which half is carrying a visible route?