AS8047 GCI

GCI is General Communication, Inc., Alaska's largest telecommunications company

and by far the dominant broadband provider in the state.

What it's used for

• Consumer and business internet access across Alaska — cable, fibre and fixed wireless. Every sampled prefix resolves under gci.net, with the classic reversed-octet subscriber pattern (NN-NN-NNN-NN.gci.net) for dynamic addresses and a .static.gci.net suffix for static assignments.
• GCI's own backbone, and the long-haul and satellite links that connect remote Alaskan communities.

Notable

• This is an eyeball network: an IP in AS8047 is almost always a subscriber, and almost always physically in Alaska. Address blocks like 24.237.0.0/16 and 209.165.128.0/18 are registered to GCI directly.
• Because GCI covers so much of the state, the AS is effectively a proxy for "consumer internet user in Alaska" — a useful signal, since very few other networks serve that geography at scale.

Interesting

• Serving Alaska means serving places with no road access, so GCI's network leans on undersea fibre, microwave and satellite backhaul to a degree almost no other US broadband operator has to.