AS10538 FWB-ALASKA-1

A rural Alaskan telephone and broadband company. The handle FWB-ALASKA-1 is opaque, but the reverse DNS settles it immediately: every sampled address answers under arctic.net, which is TelAlaska's consumer internet brand.

What it's used for

Residential and business broadband access across some of the most remote communities in the United States. RIS sees 3 announced IPv4 prefixes carrying 12,544 addresses (209.124.128.0/19, 67.59.96.0/20 and a /24), no IPv6, and one observed neighbour.

The PTRs are the useful part. Names like 67-59-96-005.broadband.nome.arctic.net and 209-124-144-005.broadband.snpn.arctic.net are per-community subscriber pools, each tagged with the town it serves, and the IP-in-the-hostname pattern is the standard giveaway of dynamically assigned access space rather than servers. 198.51.13.5 resolving to ns1.arctic.net shows the same AS also holds the operator's own infrastructure. So this is an eyeball network: the addresses terminate on customers' modems, not on hosted machines.

Notable

TelAlaska has served rural Alaska since the late 1960s and reaches villages that no other carrier does. The single observed neighbour is normal for a network at the end of a very long haul: connectivity into bush Alaska arrives over a small number of expensive paths, so there is nobody local to peer with.

Interesting

Nome's addresses appearing in the global table at all depends on subsea fibre reaching the Bering Strait coast. Broadband there is a much younger thing than the ASN carrying it.