Autonomous system
AS12440 AS12440 HNS-
Unclassified RIPE
Summary
Hughes Network Systems GmbH
isp broadband legacy
Europe's arm of a satellite internet operator, registered throughout under a 1990s brand.
What it's used for
- Satellite broadband access. 37,888 addresses in twenty-five IPv4 prefixes, nine IPv6 prefixes, and 158 observed BGP neighbours.
Notable
- Almost every block is netname
DE-DIRECPC, and the registry role account isDIRECPC Role. The dates appended run from980312to20150914, with the year format changing along the way. 128.65.64.0/20is the exception: netnameROW44, after the in-flight connectivity company whose service ran over this satellite network.- Reverse DNS answers under
direcpceu.com. Two addresses in the sample answer with their ownin-addr.arpaname instead.
Interesting
- The nine IPv6 prefixes tile perfectly. A
/36, two/40s, then a/39,/38,/37,/35,/34and/33— each doubling — cover2a0a:1240::/32end to end with nothing left over. That is what a router does when told to advertise a range that is not a power of two on the boundary it wants. - DirecPC was the consumer satellite service Hughes sold before HughesNet existed, and the name is now load-bearing: it is the netname, the role account and the DNS zone. Rebrandings reach the website first and the registry last, if ever.
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
Recorded at 4 exchanges in 3 countries, largest first.
| Exchange | Location | Their address |
|---|---|---|
| DE-CIX Frankfurt | Frankfurt, Germany | 80.81.193.118 |
| LINX LON1 | London, United Kingdom | 195.66.227.226 |
| Neutral Internet Exchange | Amsterdam, Netherlands | 193.239.118.170 |
| DE-CIX Dusseldorf | Düsseldorf, Germany | 185.1.170.245 |
Transit providers
31 upstream, 1 downstream and 44 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-16, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 20 prefixes · 37.89K addresses IPv6 9 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| DE | Germany | 29 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- RIPE
- Handle
AS12440- Registry name
- AS12440
- Registrant
- DIRECPC-MD1-MNT
- Abuse contact
- abuse@hugheseurope.com
- Registered
- 2002-07-16
- Last changed
- 2018-09-04
- Allocation
- allocated
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 100% valid · 25 valid, 0 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 24 authorising AS12440
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 25 of 25 announcements
- Route objects
- 37 naming AS12440
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