Autonomous system
AS10474 OPTINET
Hosting AFRINIC
Summary
Optinet / Dimension Data (South Africa)
OPTINET is the South African consumer-ISP address space historically operated as MWEB, NetActive and Optinet, now held by Dimension Data. Internet Solutions (a Dimension Data company, itself part of NTT) absorbed the MWEB Business and Optinet Network Services divisions in 2015, and this AS carries the retail subscriber pools that came with them.
What it's used for
Home and small-business internet access in South Africa. RIS shows 17 announced IPv4 prefixes totalling roughly 1.38 million addresses, anchored by two /13s (197.88.0.0/13, 197.80.0.0/13), a 41.132.0.0/14 and a 152.111.0.0/16. Blocks of that size, in AFRINIC's 197/41 consumer ranges, are subscriber pools — you do not allocate 1.4 million addresses to a corporate LAN.
Notable
This is an eyeball network, and the reverse DNS settles it. Sampled PTRs land on 41-132-0-5.ftth.web.africa (fibre-to-the-home), 197-88-0-5.mweb.ipv4.as20011.net (MWEB's retail brand) and vic-up-1.mweb.net, with mcr5-se1-j.optinet.net and ns3.netactive.net marking the operator's own core routers and nameservers. Per-address hostnames templated from the IP itself are the signature of an access network handing out addresses to end users.
Only 3 observed neighbours are seen, which fits: a retail ISP buys transit upstream rather than peering broadly.
Interesting
The rDNS is a fossil record of a decade of South African ISP consolidation. MWEB, NetActive, Optinet and WebAfrica hostnames all coexist inside one AS, so do not read a single retail brand from a PTR here — the space carries several.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
Recorded at 7 exchanges in 2 countries, largest first.
| Exchange | Location | Their address |
|---|---|---|
| LINX LON1 | London, United Kingdom | 195.66.224.149 |
| NAPAfrica IX Johannesburg | Johannesburg, South Africa | 196.60.8.145 |
| NAPAfrica IX Cape Town | Cape Town, South Africa | 196.60.70.15 |
| Johannesburg Internet Exchange | Johannesburg, South Africa | 196.60.96.32 |
| NAPAfrica IX Durban | Durban, South Africa | 196.10.141.75 |
| Cape Town Internet Exchange | Cape Town, South Africa | 196.223.22.32 |
| Durban Internet eXchange | Durban, South Africa | 196.223.30.32 |
Transit providers
1 upstream, 2 downstream and 3 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
| AS | Network | Paths seen |
|---|---|---|
| AS3741 | Dimension Data | 1,001 |
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-11, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 363 prefixes · 803K addresses IPv6 1 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| ZA | South Africa | 364 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- AFRINIC
- Registered
- 2015-12-11
- Allocation
- allocated
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 100% valid · 17 valid, 0 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 33 authorising AS10474
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 17 of 17 announcements
- Route objects
- 229 naming AS10474
Reputation
Classification and threat
Hosting Datacenter or cloud provider. Addresses are servers, not people.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 432 networks and 1,768 prefixes, as published 2026-10-12. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere