AS12975 PALTEL-AS PALTEL Autonomous System

372 separate IPv4 announcements from one operator, and not one address that answers to a name.

What it's used for

• The main Palestinian telecommunications operator, carrying fixed and broadband subscribers. 546,048 addresses across 372 IPv4 prefixes, 17 IPv6 prefixes, and 35 observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Netnames come in four styles: PS-PALTEL- with dates 19920310, 20000912 and 20080523; PS-PALNET- with dates, registered to a subsidiary; the bare label FTTH; and lowercase dsl-paltel.
• 158.140.64.0/18 carries the 1992 date, among the oldest in the corpus.
• Eighteen addresses were sampled and none returned a name.

Interesting

• 372 prefixes against 35 neighbours is extreme fragmentation. Announcing space in many small pieces rather than a few large ones is how an operator steers traffic across limited upstream capacity, and it is also what happens when address space arrives in scattered fragments over decades rather than as coherent allocations. Both apply here.
• The netnames name the technology instead of the holder in two cases. FTTH is fibre to the home and dsl-paltel is copper broadband, so the registry records which access network each block serves. That is genuinely useful information sitting in a field meant for a label, and almost nobody does it.
• Nothing answers reverse lookups across half a million addresses. For a consumer broadband operator that is a real absence, and it puts this network at the opposite pole from the operators in this range that encode subscriber type into every hostname.
• The subsidiary holding a large share of the blocks is named in the registry but not in the AS.