Autonomous system
AS12091 MTNNS-1
Unclassified AFRINIC
Summary
MTN South Africa
isp mobile eyeball legacy
The South African mobile network of MTN Group, the Johannesburg-headquartered operator that runs mobile businesses across much of Africa and parts of the Middle East.
What it's used for
- Mobile voice and data for one of South Africa's two largest subscriber bases, alongside fixed-wireless and business connectivity.
Notable
- A little over 1.2 million IPv4 addresses across 36 prefixes, every one of them registered to MTN SA in AFRINIC. For a network this size that is unusually tidy — no leased blocks, no third-party registrants, just one operator holding its own space.
- The addressing is characteristically African:
41.0.0.0/8and197.0.0.0/8blocks issued by AFRINIC well after the early RIR allocations, plus a single2c0f::IPv6 prefix.
Interesting
- MTN competes directly with Vodacom here, and the two of them are the main on-ramp to the internet in a market where mobile data long outpaced fixed broadband. Addresses in this space are typically handsets behind carrier-grade NAT rather than one device per address.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
No exchange port on file. Many exchanges publish no participant list, so this is not proof of absence.
Transit providers
1 upstream, 0 downstream and 1 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
| AS | Network | Paths seen |
|---|---|---|
| AS16637 | MTN SA | 8,235 |
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-17, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 34 prefixes · 1.25M addresses IPv6 1 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| ZA | South Africa | 35 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- AFRINIC
- Handle
AS12091- Registry name
- ORG-VSA1-AFRINIC
- Registrant
- MTN SA
- Registered
- 2005-02-21
- Last changed
- 2026-09-18
- Allocation
- allocated
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 95% valid · 122 valid, 7 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 7 authorising AS12091
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 41% registered · 53 of 129 announcements 42 other origin
- Route objects
- 47 naming AS12091
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 442 networks and 1,783 prefixes, as published 2026-10-17. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere