AS14677 CLICK-NETWORK

The two addresses that answer a reverse lookup are named after their hardware, twelve hexadecimal digits and nothing else.

What it's used for

• A municipal broadband network. 36,352 addresses across 19 IPv4 prefixes, with two observed BGP neighbours and no IPv6 announced.

Notable

• The AS is held by City of Tacoma under the handle CLICK-NETWORK, while every prefix is registered to Click! Network.
• Eighteen of the nineteen blocks sit inside 131.191 and carry the netname CLICK-NET-1; the nineteenth is 192.173.160.0/20, registered as ISP-ADVANTAGE.
• Two of eighteen sampled addresses returned a name: 101f747e1848.click-network.com and 000e08117757.click-network.com.

Interesting

• Twelve hexadecimal digits as a hostname is the shape of a hardware address. The zone is generated from the modem rather than from the IP, so a name identifies a physical box on a customer's wall and follows it if the address changes.
• That inverts the usual arrangement, where the label is the address written out and the hardware is invisible. Here the address is the part you cannot recover from the name.
• The city holds the AS and a separately named entity holds the addresses. Municipal networks are usually run as a utility with its own brand and its own books, and the registry records the brand while routing records the city.
• Nineteen announcements out of one 131.191 range, mostly /23s and /24s. Splitting that finely on a network with two neighbours is not traffic engineering; it is the residue of turning up service one neighbourhood at a time.