AS12996 DOMENESHOP Oslo, Norway

Thirty-one IPv6 announcements against nine IPv4 ones, from a company that sells domain names.

What it's used for

• A Norwegian domain registrar and hosting provider. 6,912 addresses across nine IPv4 prefixes, 31 IPv6 prefixes, and 38 observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• IPv6 prefixes outnumber IPv4 prefixes more than three to one.
• Netnames are NO-DOMENESHOP, some bare and some dated 20120821, 20160119, 20170501 and 20191010.
• The AS handle is DOMENESHOP Oslo, Norway, giving a city and a country.
• Eighteen addresses were sampled and none returned a name.

Interesting

• Announcing more IPv6 prefixes than IPv4 ones is the reverse of almost every network in this range, and it is what a registrar looks like when it gives each customer a real IPv6 allocation instead of an address. IPv4 forces sharing; IPv6 does not, so the announcement count grows with the customer base rather than with the traffic.
• The handle names a city, one of only two in this range to do so. An AS number carries no location of its own, so mapping infrastructure geographically depends on exactly this voluntary annotation.
• No address answered a reverse lookup. This is the second domain registrar in this range with the same result, which is worth noticing: companies whose business is running other people's DNS records do not necessarily run their own reverse zones, because nothing they sell depends on it.
• The dated netnames all fall after 2012, so the bare ones predate the convention and were never retrofitted. Two naming eras coexist in one holder's records.