AS7693 COMNET-TH KSC Commercial Internet Co. Ltd.

COMNET-TH is KSC Commercial Internet Co. Ltd. of Bangkok — Thailand's first commercial internet service provider, founded in 1994 as a joint venture between the Internet Knowledge Service Center and the Communications Authority of Thailand.

What it's used for

• Corporate internet and data-centre services. KSC has moved a long way from dial-up: it now sells corporate connectivity, colocation and cloud/VPS from internet data centres in and around Bangkok, and peers at the major Thai exchanges.
• Its address space is large for its profile — a couple of hundred thousand IPv4 addresses, much of it in the legacy 203.155.0.0/16 block. Reverse DNS is sparse, and where it exists it points at customer servers hosted on the network, such as a university's mail and file servers and a commercial mail platform.
• One surviving relic is a pool named lNNNpppNNN.ksc.net.th — the ppp in the middle is the naming convention of a dial-up era access network.

Notable

• Read this as business and hosting space, not consumer broadband. There are no modern subscriber pools in evidence — no dsl-, dyn- or cgn style naming — and the reverse DNS that does exist belongs to hosted customer machines.
• The /16 gives it an address count out of proportion to its current size. KSC is a substantial but not enormous provider; it holds a lot of address space because it was there early, not because it serves a lot of eyeballs today.
• The company operates more than one ASN; this is the original one.

Interesting

• The Communications Authority of Thailand's stake in the original joint venture means the country's first commercial ISP was, from day one, half-owned by the state telecom authority it was ostensibly commercialising around — a very common shape for early national internet ventures across Asia.