AS7861 TELUS-7861

TELUS-7861 belongs to TELUS Communications Inc., the Vancouver-headquartered Canadian carrier. It is a secondary TELUS autonomous system, not the company's main network: TELUS's principal AS is AS852, which is also AS7861's only upstream.

What it's used for

• Announcing about 35 fragmented legacy ARIN blocks out of TELUS's older Canadian allocations — pieces of 204.191.0.0/16, 207.34.0.0/16, 209.91.0.0/16, 209.29.0.0/16, 209.121.0.0/16 and 154.11.0.0/16. All are registered to TELUS itself; there are no downstream networks.
• The reverse DNS is a mix rather than a single population, which is why this AS resists a clean classification:
• Legacy dial-up pools still exist, e.g. ip4-25.eyrkonaeac10.dialup.ca.telus.com.
• Business and hosted customers reverse to their own domains, and some space belongs to TELUS's own labs (mail.sfbdemo.teluslabs.net).
• Whole /24s answer with wildcard-generated placeholder names of the form host44.158.115.209.in-addr.arpa, which carry no information at all.

Notable

• Do not read TELUS's consumer broadband business onto this AS. TELUS's residential eyeball traffic lives on AS852. AS7861 is a grab-bag of older assignments, and with dial-up remnants, business customers and lab space all in the same footprint there is no honest single kind for it.
• The blocks are Canadian and TELUS-registered, so geolocating them to Canada is safe even though classifying them is not.

Interesting

• The technical contact on every one of these blocks is still the ARIN handle PSINET-CA-ARIN, now attached to TELUS's IP Address Administration. TELUS bought PSINet's bankrupt Canadian operation in June 2001, and AS7861 was registered in January 2002 — the handle is a fossil of that deal.