AS10019 MCTV Matsusaka Cable-TV Station Inc.

MCTV is Matsusaka Cable-TV Station Inc. (松阪ケーブルテレビ・ステーション), the community cable operator for Matsusaka City and the surrounding Taki and Watarai districts in central Mie Prefecture. Founded in 1990 and on air since 1993, it sells cable TV, FTTH internet (up to 10 Gbps), cable telephony and MVNO mobile to households in its franchise area.

What it's used for

Residential and small-business access. The AS announces 11 IPv4 prefixes totalling 47,104 addresses plus one IPv6 /32. Every sampled address resolves in the operator's own mctv.ne.jp zone, in two subscriber-pool styles: host-218-185-160-5.mctv.ne.jp, which encodes the address into the label, and the terser f176005.mctv.ne.jp / m240005.mctv.ne.jp, where the prefix letter looks like a line-type marker and the digits are the address. Bulk per-address PTRs like these exist to name customer-premises equipment; server, backbone and management space is not named this way.

Notable

An eyeball network, and the ratio confirms it: 47k addresses against 23 observed BGP neighbours. That is an access ISP with a handful of upstreams plus local peering — a wholesale carrier holding the same space would carry an order of magnitude more adjacencies. Geolocate this space to households in central Mie, not to a data centre.

Interesting

One announced block, 194.193.96.0/19, is RIPE-region space sitting incongruously among APNIC allocations. That mismatch is worth a second look, because scattered cross-RIR /24s are a broker tell — but it is not one here: the block carries first-party reverse DNS in MCTV's own zone (host-194-193-96-5.mctv.ne.jp), which is the discriminator between a real operator with oddly-acquired legacy space and a broker announcing someone else's.