AS10099 UNICOM-GLOBAL China Unicom Global

UNICOM-Global is China Unicom (Hong Kong) Operations Limited, the international carrier arm of China Unicom. It is the AS that fronts Unicom's business outside mainland China, and it behaves like a wholesale carrier rather than an access network.

What it's used for

Selling international IP transit, private lines and China-inbound connectivity to carriers, content providers and multinationals. The AS announces 85 IPv4 prefixes totalling only 32,768 addresses plus 10 IPv6 prefixes. That is a small address footprint by any standard, and the prefixes are scattered across many small blocks (203.160.64.0/19, 119.252.136.0/21, 162.219.32.0/21, and a long tail of /22s and /24s) drawn from both APNIC and ARIN space, consistent with points of presence spread across many countries rather than one home market.

Notable

This is a transit carrier, and the neighbour count is what settles it. The AS is seen with 297 observed BGP neighbours against those 32,768 addresses. An eyeball or enterprise network with that little space would peer with a handful of ASes; only a network whose product is interconnection peers with hundreds. The address space here is mostly infrastructure, PoP transit links and customer assignments, not a subscriber base.

Interesting

Because the customer base is other people's networks, prefixes routed through AS10099 are frequently mistaken for it. Traffic transiting Unicom Global reaches destinations all over Asia, Europe and North America. Geolocate the announced blocks to Unicom's own PoPs, not to a single country, and never infer a Chinese end user from a Unicom Global path.