AS7482 APOL-AS Asia Pacific On-line Service Inc.

APOL-AS is APOL (亞太線上), a Taiwanese fixed-line ISP that began operating in 2001 under Eastern Broadband Telecommunications, was merged into Asia Pacific Telecom in 2011, and passed to Far EasTone when Far EasTone absorbed the Asia Pacific Telecom group at the end of 2023.

What it's used for

• Consumer and business broadband access in Taiwan. Reverse DNS across the space is unambiguous subscriber naming: …adsl.dynamic.apol.com.tw, …cm.dynamic.apol.com.tw (cable modem) and …vdslpro.static.apol.com.tw.
• The footprint is large, roughly 544,000 IPv4 addresses across ~78 prefixes, much of it in /18s. That is eyeball-network scale, not hosting scale.

Notable

• APOL also ran IDC and colocation services in its independent days, but the routed space today reads overwhelmingly as access: dial-era ADSL, cable and VDSL pools rather than servers.
• The hostname prefixes encode Taiwanese cities (kh for Kaohsiung, ch for Changhua, nk for Nankan among them), a small map of the network's regional footprint hiding in the reverse DNS.

Interesting

• Three corporate owners in twenty-odd years, and the apol.com.tw naming has survived all of them. Subscriber reverse-DNS zones are among the stickiest things in a network: renaming millions of PTR records is rarely worth anyone's trouble.