AS7961 RBC

RBC is Raw Bandwidth Communications, Inc., a small independent broadband ISP

based in San Bruno, California, serving the San Francisco Peninsula and parts of

the wider Bay Area. Despite the handle, it has nothing to do with the Royal Bank

of Canada.

What it's used for

• DSL subscriber access. The rDNS is a textbook access pattern: m128-NN.dsl.rawbw.com and gw128-1.dsl.rawbw.com across 66.181.128.0/20 — per-line gateway and modem names on a dsl.rawbw.com zone.
• Business DSL, Ethernet-over-Copper and colocation for local customers.
• Legacy space from TSoft, an older Bay Area ISP whose network Raw Bandwidth absorbed — gw1.tsoft.net, ns.tsoft.net and shell.tsoft.com still resolve inside 198.144.192.0/19.

Notable

• This is a genuine eyeball / access network, just a very small one: a few tens of thousands of addresses in total. Addresses here are end-user lines, mixed residential and small-business, not servers.
• Its prefixes are its own ARIN assignments and carry consistent first-party rDNS, which is what separates a real small ISP from a leased-address operation.

Interesting

• Raw Bandwidth has been serving the Peninsula since 1997 — the same year the AS number was registered — and is one of the last surviving independent DSL ISPs from the era when CLEC copper unbundling made hundreds of them possible.