AS10804 MFNM-AS

MFNM-AS belongs to Matawa First Nations Management, the non-profit tribal-council service organisation for the nine Matawa First Nations of northern Ontario. It is the AS behind Rapid Lynx, the community-owned fibre network being built to connect remote fly-in communities. RIS sees 1 IPv4 prefix (256 addresses), 1 IPv6 prefix, and 11 observed neighbours.

What it's used for

Community broadband and the organisation's own services. The entire IPv4 footprint is a single 23.174.216.0/24. The IPv6 side is the one that says what this network is for: 2607:a3c0::/32 is an ISP-scale allocation, the size a provider takes when it intends to hand /48s or /56s down to subscriber premises, not something an office network needs. Rapid Lynx is designed to deliver symmetrical gigabit service to homes and businesses in communities such as Eabametoong, Marten Falls, Webequie, Neskantaga and Nibinamik, over a fibre build of roughly a thousand kilometres, and to remain owned and operated by the First Nations themselves.

Notable

11 neighbours against 256 IPv4 addresses is a lot of peering for a very small announcement, and it fits a network that has done the interconnection work ahead of the subscriber build. The gap between the routed footprint and the scale of the fibre project is the honest headline here: the network is real and interconnected, but what it currently announces is small.

Interesting

Most holders in this ASN range are carriers, banks or universities. This one is an Indigenous-owned non-profit, and it is a first-mile network in the literal sense: the communities it serves had no terrestrial high-speed connectivity at all before the Rapid Lynx build.