AS11711 TULAROSA-COMMUNICATIONS

TULAROSA-COMMUNICATIONS is Tularosa Communications, Inc., an independent telephone company and broadband ISP serving the Tularosa Basin of south-central New Mexico. Its network carries residential and small-business subscribers in and around Tularosa, Alamogordo and the surrounding Otero County communities.

What it's used for

RIS currently sees five IPv4 prefixes totalling 78,080 addresses plus one IPv6 /32 (2607:f068::/32), against ten observed neighbours. Ten neighbours for roughly 78k addresses is an eyeball network, not a carrier: an operator that sells transit ends up peering with hundreds of ASes, whereas a rural telco buys a couple of upstreams and hands the rest of the addresses to subscribers.

The reverse DNS settles the point. Sampled addresses across the 67.211, 66.18 and 72.0 blocks come back as hs-88-5.cust.tularosa.net, hs-40-5.cust.tularosa.net and hs-168-5.ala.tularosa.net — "hs" for high-speed, "cust" for customer, plus a router loopback (rtr-lo-generic-160-5.tularosa.net). Those are subscriber access pools with the operator's own naming scheme on them, which is what distinguishes a real access ISP from a network merely holding address space.

Notable

The largest prefix on the AS, 146.5.0.0/16, is not registered to Tularosa at all: ARIN shows it as NSO-SUNSPOT, the National Solar Observatory. The 192.41.211.0/24 seen alongside it belongs to Apache Point Observatory. Both sit in the Sacramento Mountains above Tularosa, and this small telco is the network that carries them to the rest of the internet. It is a good example of why the registrant list has to be read rather than pattern-matched: third-party registrants here are neighbours on a mountain, not leased proxy space.