AS10098 HENDERSON-HK Towngas Telecommunications Fixed Network Ltd

HENDERSON-HK is Towngas Telecommunications (TGT), the licensed fixed-network and data-centre arm of The Hong Kong and China Gas Company. The handle is a fossil: it dates from the Henderson group era and no longer names the holder.

What it's used for

Enterprise connectivity and colocation, not consumer broadband. The AS announces 37 IPv4 prefixes totalling 19,456 addresses plus 3 IPv6 prefixes, and the sampled reverse DNS splits cleanly into two first-party service domains: 202-123-80-5.static.towngastelecom.com and 49-213-0-5.static.hdcdatacentre.com. Both are TGT's own zones (HDC is its Hong Kong data-centre brand), and the static. label in every sampled name is the tell: this space is handed out as fixed assignments to businesses and racks, not dynamically to subscriber CPE. TGT famously built its fibre plant by threading glass through the town-gas pipe network, which is how a utility ended up holding a carrier licence.

Notable

This is a business/enterprise network with a hosting component, and the neighbour count settles it. Roughly 19,500 addresses against just 27 observed BGP neighbours rules out a wholesale carrier, which would peer with hundreds of ASes at this size. It equally rules out an eyeball ISP: there is no dynamic-pool naming anywhere in the sample. What is left is exactly what TGT sells — leased lines, IP transit for corporate customers, and colocation in its own data centres.

Interesting

Geolocation should treat the hdcdatacentre.com blocks as server space and the towngastelecom.com blocks as customer-premises enterprise circuits. Both are Hong Kong, but they behave very differently.