AS15399 WANANCHI-

Nine IPv6 announcements that double in size step by step and tile one range exactly.

What it's used for

• A large consumer and business internet provider. One hundred and fifty-seven IPv4 prefixes and eighteen IPv6 prefixes announced from Kenya, two hundred and twenty-six thousand addresses, across fourteen observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• The IPv6 announcements form a staircase: two /48 prefixes, then a /47, a /46, a /45, a /43, a /42 and a /41, each covering twice the space of the last, plus a /44 below them. Together they tile one contiguous range exactly.
• The holder's name is stored twice on one line, separated by a dash, the same words repeated.
• The AS handle is the company name followed by a hyphen and nothing after it.
• Almost every netname is the registry's own organisation identifier rather than a name; one block's is recorded as unknown.
• Three answering addresses put the full address in front of the company domain, unreversed, so the name reads as the number it points at.

Interesting

• That staircase is what an allocation looks like when it is announced piece by piece as each part is brought into service, and the pieces were never merged afterwards.
• Fourteen neighbours for a network this large is few. It suggests most traffic leaves through a small number of upstreams, which is the usual constraint where undersea capacity is expensive.
• One hundred and fifty-seven IPv4 routes from one operator is a heavy load on every router on the internet, and most of it could be carried by far fewer announcements.