AS11597 MW-KANSAS

MW-KANSAS is Mercury Broadband (formerly Mercury Wireless), a Midwestern fixed-wireless and fibre internet provider serving rural and small-town Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and neighbouring states. The handle preserves the Kansas origin; the rDNS preserves the old name.

What it's used for

This is the cleanest eyeball-ISP evidence in the batch. RIS shows 36 announced IPv4 prefixes, 10,240 addresses, 6 IPv6 prefixes (a 2605:ae80::/32 with four /36s carved from it) and 9 observed neighbours. Every prefix RDAP resolved registers to Mercury Broadband itself, under MERCURY-WIRELESS and MWIN — not one third-party registrant, which removes the leased-address question entirely.

Reverse DNS settles the use. Nineteen sampled addresses across nine different prefixes all resolve to the same template: host204-10-232-005.rev.mercurywireless.com, host104-218-88-005.rev.mercurywireless.com, and so on. A single machine-generated PTR pattern applied uniformly across the whole estate is how an access provider numbers subscriber lines. Individual servers get individual names; customer pools get templates.

The prefix list is heavily deaggregated — /21s and /22s announced alongside the /23s and /24s inside them — which is what a wireless operator does when different tower clusters hang off different upstreams. Nine neighbours is consistent: several transit providers plus regional peering, not a carrier role.

Notable

The /36s carved out of the IPv6 /32 and announced separately point the same way: per-region or per-POP allocations for distributing addresses to customers. Mercury holds and announces its own space, runs its own rDNS, and uses it for residential broadband.