AS7718 TransACT-SDN-AS

TransACT-SDN-AS is TransACT Capital Communications, the fibre and broadband operator built to serve Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory. It is now part of the iiNet / TPG group, and the AS still carries its access network.

What it's used for

• Subscriber broadband. The reverse DNS is unambiguous access-network naming: ppp-NN-NNN.grapevine.net.au for dial-in and PPP-authenticated sessions, and static-NNN-NN.grapevine.net.au, static-NNN-NN.grapevine.transact.net.au and static-NNN-NN.transact.net.au for fixed customer allocations. Grapevine was TransACT's retail ISP brand.
• Roughly 40,000 IPv4 addresses across a mix of larger blocks and stray /24s, plus IPv6.

Notable

• This is eyeball address space concentrated on one Australian city. Traffic from it is a Canberra household or small business, not a datacentre.
• The prefixes tell the ownership story better than the AS name does: the largest block is registered in APNIC to iiNet Limited, not to TransACT, while the ASN's own APNIC organisation object resolves to AAPT Limited — another company inside the same corporate group. Three names, one network. The transact.net.au and grapevine.net.au reverse DNS is the thread that actually identifies it.
• Both ppp- and static- naming appear side by side, so the space mixes dynamically assigned consumer sessions with fixed business-grade allocations.

Interesting

• TransACT was an unusual thing for Australia: a city-scale challenger that laid its own fibre and VDSL plant in Canberra in the early 2000s, years before the National Broadband Network, rather than reselling the incumbent's copper. The company was absorbed by iiNet and then TPG, but the AS number, the brand names in the reverse DNS, and the address blocks all survived the acquisitions intact.