AS16229 PRIMETEL Telecommunications Company

Ninety-nine prefixes, every netname carrying a family name the company no longer uses.

What it's used for

• A national provider's network. Ninety-nine IPv4 prefixes announced from Cyprus, no IPv6, thirty-nine thousand six hundred and eighty addresses, through one observed BGP neighbour.

Notable

• Every sampled netname follows one scheme: a country code, a family name, and a date. The family name appears in no other field, so the netnames record a predecessor the rest of the record has forgotten.
• The dates are mostly eight digits, but the oldest two use six, dropping the century, and they are the blocks that predate the switch.
• Three contacts sit on every block: the company, an administrative role naming the registry it deals with, and an abuse role.
• Six of eighteen queried addresses answered, on two unrelated domains. The company's own domain splits the brand with a hyphen that the company name does not have.
• Two names are customer equipment, each with a six-digit account number, under labels for business and for the access technology.
• Two more sit on a second brand's domain: a backbone router and a control host.

Interesting

• Ninety-nine prefixes behind a single observed neighbour is a network that has been given address space many times and connectivity once. The fragmentation is history, not design.
• Netnames outlive companies because changing one means asking the registry, while changing a website means asking nobody. The oldest name in a record is usually the truest thing about its past.