AS11814 DISTRIBUTEL-AS11814

DISTRIBUTEL-AS11814 is Distributel Communications Limited, one of Canada's largest independent retail telecom providers. Founded in 1988, it resells and wholesales access over incumbent lines (Bell in Ontario and Quebec, Telus in the west) and was itself acquired by Bell Canada in a deal announced in 2022. The AS is its eyeball network.

What it's used for

• Consumer and small-business internet access — DSL, cable and fibre subscribers across Canada. The reverse DNS settles it beyond argument: nearly every sampled address lands in .cpe.distributel.net or .rdns.distributel.net, and cpe is customer-premises equipment. This is subscriber space, not hosting or enterprise space.
• RIS sees 81 IPv4 prefixes / 353,024 addresses, 1 IPv6 prefix (a 2610:1e8::/32), and 19 observed neighbours. A third of a million addresses against fewer than twenty peers is exactly the eyeball ratio: a lot of end users, a modest set of upstreams and interconnects, no wholesale transit role.

Notable

• The whole inventory is self-registered to Distributel, and the netnames read as a map of the company's footprint: DTEL-EASTERNCANADA-V4-04, DTEL-TORONTO-BLR-V4-04, DTEL-BOLTON-V4-01, DTEL-WINDSOR-TEC4-V4-02. Registrant, announcer and rDNS all agree.
• One block, 204.11.121.0/24, still registers under the handle YAK — Distributel acquired Yak Communications from Globalive in 2016, and the acquired company's address space carries its old name in the registry. A registrant handle that does not match the holder's brand is post-acquisition history here, not a leasing tell.
• Address space is heavily fragmented across many legacy ranges (66.11, 66.49, 69.171, 72.53, 172.97, 198.91, 198.200, 209.195, 216.58, 216.246), which is what decades of growth-by-acquisition looks like in a routing table.

Interesting

• Only a single IPv6 /32 is announced against 81 IPv4 prefixes.