AS11138 BEK-COMMUNICATIONS-INTERNET-ROUTER - BEK Communications Cooperative

BEK-COMMUNICATIONS-INTERNET-ROUTER is the AS of BEK Communications Cooperative, a member-owned rural telephone and broadband cooperative headquartered in Steele, North Dakota. Founded in 1952 by subscribers in Burleigh, Emmons and Kidder counties — the "B-E-K" of the name — it now serves roughly 11,000 customers across a dozen central-ND counties with fiber internet, voice and TV.

What it's used for

An eyeball access network. RIS observes 56 announced IPv4 prefixes carrying about 18,944 addresses, no IPv6, and a single observed BGP neighbour: a co-op buying transit, not selling it. The address count lines up closely with the subscriber count, which is what a residential access network looks like when nearly every customer is a household or a small-town business.

Notable

The reverse DNS settles the classification. Sampled addresses across five different announced blocks all resolve under bektel.com, and the naming is generic access-pool naming — static-240-5.bektel.com, dhcp-75-133.bektel.com, and plain 64.202.36.5.bektel.com style records. Static and DHCP labels describe the assignment mechanism, not the customer, but a network whose PTRs are wall-to-wall first-party pools with an occasional business mail host (mail.feiinc.com) sitting in the middle of them is carrying subscribers, not servers.

Interesting

Every prefix the pack could resolve is registered to a BEK-* handle — BEK-64-31-240-0, BEK-142-44-8-0, and so on. The inventory is scattered across six unrelated-looking /8s (64.31, 64.202, 69.84, 64.38, 104.152, 142.44, 208.85), the accumulated result of years of small ARIN allocations, but every one of them is self-registered with first-party rDNS. That is the honest version of an untidy network, and it is exactly what distinguishes it from an AS announcing space registered to third parties.