Autonomous system
AS14988 BTC-GATE1
Unclassified AFRINIC
Summary
Botswana Telecommunications Corporation
isp telecom infrastructure
A national incumbent whose every registry record comes back with no netname and no registrant at all.
What it's used for
- Botswana's incumbent telecom operator. 65,792 addresses across 52 IPv4 prefixes plus two IPv6 prefixes, with 17 observed BGP neighbours. All 54 announced blocks are attributed to Botswana.
Notable
- Every prefix looked up returned
netname=unknown registrant=unknown. The records exist; the fields are empty. - Almost all 52 prefixes sit inside
168.167, announced in pieces from/19down to/22. - The two IPv6 prefixes are
2001:43f8:17c0::/48and2c0f:ff00::/32. - Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.
- One lookup, for
168.167.64.0/21, failed outright, which is a different thing from an empty record.
Interesting
- Most networks in this corpus give something away in the registry: a city, a department, a ticket number. This one gives nothing, across every block, and the address space still routes fine. Netnames are a convention rather than a requirement, and a registry that never enforced them ends up with records that identify a block and describe nobody.
- Fifty-two announcements out of one sixteen-bit range is a lot of deaggregation for a single country. Splitting advertises which pieces go where, and it also keeps a piece reachable when a link to one part of the network drops.
- The
/48is a single-site allocation sitting beside a/32that could hold a nation. Two requests, decades apart in intent.
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 1 exchange in 1 country, largest first.
| Exchange | Location | Their address |
|---|---|---|
| NAPAfrica IX Johannesburg | Johannesburg, South Africa | 196.60.8.50 |
Transit providers
5 upstream, 3 downstream and 11 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 2026-10-10, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 52 prefixes · 65.79K addresses IPv6 2 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| BW | Botswana | 54 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- AFRINIC
- Handle
AS14988- Registry name
- ORG-BTC2-AFRINIC
- Registrant
- Botswana Telecommunications Corporation
- Registered
- 2005-02-21
- Last changed
- 2024-04-26
- Allocation
- allocated
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 96% valid · 90 valid, 4 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 3 authorising AS14988
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 94 of 94 announcements
- Route objects
- 110 naming AS14988
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: 431 networks and 1,775 prefixes, as published 2026-10-11. 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