AS7590 COMSATS Commission on Science and Technology for

COMSATS — the network of the Commission on Science and Technology for

Sustainable Development in the South, an intergovernmental science organisation

headquartered in Islamabad, which runs COMSATS Internet Services as a working ISP

in Pakistan.

What it's used for

• Internet access and hosting sold across Pakistan under comsats.net.pk, plus connectivity for the organisation's own academic and institutional users.
• The reverse DNS is a genuinely mixed bag, and that mix is the point: legacy dial-up subscriber pools named 210-56-9-NNN.Dialup.isb.comsats.net.pk, hosted virtual servers such as vps3.comsats.net.pk, and third-party organisations' servers — an NGO, a newspaper, a logistics firm, and COMSATS University.

Notable

• An IP here can be either a subscriber address or a hosted server, so a single use-type label does not fit the AS as a whole. It is a full-service ISP rather than a pure eyeball network or a pure hosting provider, and it should be treated with that ambiguity in mind.
• The space is COMSATS' own — around 56 contiguous-ish /24s from Pakistan's 203.124 and 210.56 APNIC ranges — so geolocation to Pakistan is sound even where the use type is not.

Interesting

• The parent COMSATS is an intergovernmental body with member states across the developing world, an unusual owner for a commercial-looking ISP AS: the ISP arm was set up to fund and extend the organisation's science-and-technology mandate.