AS14051 SUREWEST

Three company names and two incompatible reverse-DNS conventions, all live at once on one network.

What it's used for

• A fibre and broadband ISP. 197,888 addresses across 117 IPv4 prefixes plus 13 IPv6 prefixes, with 28 observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• The AS handle is SUREWEST; the registrant is either Fidium or Consolidated Communications, Inc. depending on the block.
• CCI-CA-9 labels two blocks, one registered to each of those two names.
• Netnames run CONSO-8, CCI-CA-5, CCI-CA-7 through CCI-CA-11, CCI-MATTOON and the unabbreviated CONSOLIDATEDCOMMUNICATIONS.
• Thirteen of eighteen sampled addresses returned a name, under two different domains: fidium.ccidns.net and surewest.net.
• The two domains use opposite address orders: 70-9-111-254.scrmca.fidium.ccidns.net reads forwards, while 255.111-113-64.ftth.swbr.surewest.net puts the last octet first.

Interesting

• Four company names are visible at once here: one in the AS handle, two in the registrant fields, and a fourth abbreviation in the netnames. Each rename touched whichever records were cheap to touch and left the rest, so the corporate history is readable in the order the layers were written.
• The reverse names sort customers by service: ftth for fibre to the home and res.dyn for residential dynamic, with a site code in between. Anyone querying an address learns both what kind of line it is and roughly where.
• Two naming conventions running side by side means two systems generating names, neither retired. The address order is the tell: nobody writing both would have chosen opposite ends.