AS10199 TATA-AS Tata Communications Ltd

TATA-AS is held by Tata Communications Ltd — the company that grew out of VSNL,

India's former international-gateway monopoly. Despite the famous name, this

particular ASN is not the global backbone; it carries Indian end-user access

space.

What it's used for

• Subscriber and customer connectivity inside India. The reverse DNS is unambiguous about what lives here: pools like mum-cdma.dialup.vsnl.net.in, cdma-delhi.vsnl.net.in and del-cdma.dialup.vsnl.net.in, alongside static customer assignments named static-pune, static-delhi, static-kolkata and static-ttsl-hyderabad (TTSL being Tata Teleservices).

Notable

This is an eyeball access network, not a carrier, and two things settle it.

First the naming: dialup and cdma pools are dynamic subscriber address space,

and the static-<city> blocks are fixed assignments to broadband and small

business customers — both are customer-facing, not backbone. Second the topology:

RIS sees 47 announced IPv4 prefixes totalling 180,480 addresses, no IPv6, and

only 1 observed neighbour. A wholesale carrier peers with hundreds to

thousands of ASes; a single observed neighbour means this AS sits behind Tata's

transit, as an access network hanging off the group's backbone rather than being

it.

Note that cdma here names the access technology, not the customer type — it

was Tata's wireless-broadband last mile (the Indicom/Photon EVDO dongles and fixed

wireless terminals), which served ordinary homes and small offices.

Interesting

Addresses in this AS geolocate to specific Indian metros, and the PTRs say which:

Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad and Kolkata all appear by name in the hostnames.