AS10352 WCTC

WCTC is Solarus, the Wisconsin Rapids telephone company — founded in 1896 as

Wood County Telephone Company and rebranded in the 2000s. It is the largest

independent telco in Wisconsin, serving roughly 17,000 customers with fiber

internet, phone and TV.

What it's used for

• Consumer and small-business broadband across central Wisconsin: FTTH, legacy DSL and dial-era access aggregation, plus the company's IT-services arm.
• The reverse DNS is the giveaway and it is unusually rich: DSLPool-net208-5, wau-dsl-208-5.solarus.net, sharondsl-p1-5, Baraboo-nas3-219-133 (a network access server — dial/DSL aggregation), and rows of numerically-named 063-247-032-005.solarus.net hosts. Pooled, per-address, positionally-named PTRs like these are what a subscriber access network looks like.

Notable

• Eyeball ISP, not carrier. RIS sees 57 IPv4 prefixes / 32,768 addresses plus one IPv6 prefix (2605:7240::/32), against 14 observed BGP neighbours. Fourteen neighbours is a well-connected regional access network buying transit and peering locally; a wholesale carrier of any scale peers with hundreds.
• The heavy deaggregation of a modest address pool across many /22–/24s is the fingerprint of an ILEC that has absorbed neighbouring exchanges over time.

Interesting

• The rDNS is a fossil record of acquisitions: wctc.net, solarus.net, mtc.net, tznet.com, dwave.net/dwave.org and sharontelephone.com all appear in the same AS — several small Wisconsin telephone companies and ISPs now answering under one roof, with their old naming still in place.