AS10118 HTCL-IAS-HK-AP Hutchison Telephone Company Limited

HTCL-IAS-HK-AP is Hutchison Telephone Company Limited, the operating company behind 3 Hong Kong — the CK Hutchison mobile carrier with roughly three million subscribers and about a fifth of the Hong Kong mobile market. The IAS in the handle stands for Internet Access Service: this is the AS that carries 3's mobile data customers to the internet.

What it's used for

Handset and mobile-broadband traffic. The AS announces 79 IPv4 prefixes totalling 45,056 addresses plus 18 IPv6 prefixes, the latter a set of large /36s out of 2407:3100::/32. That IPv6 profile is itself a mobile tell: cellular cores hand every attached device a v6 prefix, so operators carve their allocation into many large chunks per region and per APN, while a fixed enterprise would have no use for eighteen /36s.

Notable

This is a mobile eyeball network, and the ratio of users to addresses is the reason it looks smaller than it is. Roughly 45,000 public addresses against millions of subscribers only works because mobile data is delivered behind large-scale carrier NAT, with thousands of handsets sharing each public IPv4 address. The 19 observed BGP neighbours confirm the role from the other side: an eyeball carrier buys transit and peers locally, whereas a wholesale transit network at this size would be seen with hundreds of neighbours.

Interesting

3 Hong Kong splits its estate across more than one AS. Its legacy WAP gateway space sits separately in [AS10116](https://asn.ipinfo.app/AS10116), which is why two adjacent AS numbers carry the same holder name.