AS10013 FBDC FreeBit Co.,Ltd.

FBDC is FreeBit Co., Ltd., a Tokyo-listed company that sells "ISP in a box" — the network, provisioning and billing plumbing that other companies rent to run a retail broadband or MVNO brand. It also owns retail ISPs of its own, notably DTI.

What it's used for

Consumer broadband access, at scale. The AS announces 407 IPv4 prefixes totalling roughly 1,944,000 addresses plus 3 IPv6 prefixes. The reverse DNS is uniform and unambiguous: 5.0.232.111.ap.yournet.ne.jp, 5.128.55.36.ap.yournet.ne.jp — the address reversed into the label under FreeBit's yournet.ne.jp access zone, which is exactly the bulk PTR scheme an operator uses for customer-premises equipment. A second sample, PPPa257.e25.eacc.dti.ne.jp, is a PPP session name on DTI, FreeBit's own retail brand.

Notable

An eyeball network, and the routing shape proves it rather than the marketing. Nearly 2 million addresses against just 10 observed BGP neighbours is emphatically not a carrier: a wholesale transit business holding that much space peers with hundreds of ASes. FreeBit sells wholesale ISP services, not wholesale transit — the addresses terminate on Japanese households, even when the brand on the customer's bill is somebody else's.

Interesting

This is a case where the space genuinely carries other companies' subscribers, but it is not the address-broker silhouette. The prefixes are registered to FreeBit and carry first-party rDNS in FreeBit's own zone; the retail brand is a billing relationship layered on top. Geolocate to residential Japan, and expect the operator-of-record and the consumer-facing brand to disagree.