AS11525 HRTC

HRTC is Hancock Rural Telephone Corporation, which does business as **NineStar

Connect** — a member-owned rural utility cooperative in Hancock County, Indiana.

It is an eyeball network: the space carries broadband subscribers.

What it's used for

• Residential and small-business broadband for rural east-central Indiana. NineStar is a multi-utility co-op (electricity, water, wastewater, telephone, internet) and was an early fibre-to-the-home deployer in the state, serving communities such as Greenfield, Fortville, New Palestine, and Shelbyville.
• RIS sees 7 announced IPv4 prefixes totalling 11,520 addresses, one IPv6 prefix (2606:5d00::/28), and 8 observed BGP neighbours. Mostly /21s, a handful of upstreams: a small access network, not a carrier.

Notable

• Reverse DNS is what settles the classification, and it names the access technology directly. Sampled addresses answer as 64-184-8-5.publicdhcp.hrtc.net, 208-70-40-5.bb.hrtc.net, and 74-112-112-5.static.hrtc.net. A publicdhcp pool and a bb (broadband) pool alongside a static range is the signature of a consumer ISP that also sells fixed addresses to businesses. Two sampled hosts belong to customers rather than the ISP — hancock.hancockcoingov.org (the county government) and sm.fidelityappraisals.com — which is what a local provider's business tier looks like.

Interesting

• One prefix, 168.100.180.0/22, is registered to JCFiber rather than to Hancock. JCFiber is another Indiana rural fibre provider, and NineStar's own history emphasises strategic partnerships with neighbouring cooperatives. A co-op carrying a partner co-op's block fits that pattern far better than any leasing story, though the exact arrangement is not visible in the routing. The remaining prefixes all register to Hancock Internet, and one, 63.208.139.0/24, carries the handle HANCOC-LVLT-63-208-139 — provider-assigned space from Level 3, which is ordinary upstream allocation rather than third-party space.