SYSTEM Cited by 1 source
Sparkle (AS6762)¶
Sparkle — Telecom Italia Sparkle — is an Italian Tier-1 transit-free backbone operator, operating AS AS6762.
Tier-1 profile¶
A Tier-1 network has no upstream providers: its only BGP relationships are lateral peers (other Tier-1s) and downstream customers. In an ASPA deployment, Sparkle would use the reserved AS0 member in its ASPA object to encode this explicitly: "I have no upstream providers."
Role in the 2026-01-02 BGP anomaly¶
Sparkle was the upstream source of the leaked routes in the AS8048 hairpin leak: its customer AS8048 (CANTV) took prefixes learned from AS6762 and re-advertised them to AS8048's other provider AS52320 (V.tal GlobeNet). Sparkle itself did nothing wrong in this incident.
RPKI ROV deployment¶
At the time of the 2026-01-08 Cloudflare post, Sparkle had an incomplete RPKI ROV deployment per APNIC stats, and was marked "unsafe" on isbgpsafeyet.com as a result. The newsletter flagging the Venezuela anomaly cited this as "notable" — but Cloudflare's response is that it's orthogonal to the leak. The 01-02 event was a path anomaly (leak), not an origin anomaly (hijack); even full ROV deployment at AS6762 would not have prevented it.
Update 2026-02-03: Sparkle completed RPKI ROV deployment and was marked safe on isbgpsafeyet.com — a net win for the Internet, but unrelated to the 01-02 incident.
Seen in¶
- sources/2026-01-08-cloudflare-a-closer-look-at-a-bgp-anomaly-in-venezuela — named upstream-source AS for the leaked prefixes; Tier-1 / AS0-in-ASPA worked example; 2026-02-03 ROV-safe update cited.