AS10474 OPTINET

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.