AS10980 STAFFORD

STAFFORD is Stafford Communications, a locally owned fixed-wireless internet provider based in Gronlid, Saskatchewan, serving rural east-central Saskatchewan. Despite the American-registered address space, this is a Canadian rural eyeball network.

What it's used for

RIS sees 14 announced IPv4 prefixes totalling 3,072 addresses, no IPv6, and 4 observed neighbours. A handful of upstreams and three thousand addresses is a small regional access network, not a carrier.

The reverse DNS is unusually informative. Sampled addresses come back as 198.167.166.5.FGLNSK.STAFFCOMM.NET, 198.167.165.5.SCTYSK.STAFFCOMM.NET and 198.167.167.5.NPWNSK.STAFFCOMM.NET: per-IP PTRs under the operator's own domain, tagged with site codes that all end in SK (Saskatchewan) and clearly correspond to individual tower or community sites. A second group reads 208.77.142.5.4GLTE.staffcomm.net, naming the LTE access technology. Those hostnames describe a fixed-wireless subscriber network: each block maps to a tower footprint, and the customers on the other end of those LTE radios are rural homes and small businesses. As always, the technology in the PTR names the mechanism, not the customer type; here the mechanism is last-mile radio.

Notable

• The company has publicly partnered with SaskTel to extend coverage and speeds in rural Saskatchewan, and serves on the order of a thousand-plus subscribers.
• The site codes in rDNS make this AS a rare case where the routing data alone reveals the operator's physical footprint, one tower at a time.
• A Canadian operator announcing ARIN 74., 198.167. and 208.77. space is a good reminder that address-block geography is not network geography.