AS8298 IPNG

IPNG is IPng Networks GmbH, a small Swiss network operator around Zürich. It sells colocation, hosting, IP transit and network consultancy, and runs a deliberately IPv6-forward network with points of presence in the Zürich area and a European ring reaching Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris and Geneva.

What it's used for

• Colocation and hosted infrastructure, plus BGP transit for a handful of downstream networks. The AS announces a few /24s of its own alongside IPv6.
• Reverse DNS is entirely operator infrastructure and follows a tidy site-coded scheme: border0.chbtl0.ipng.ch, chlzn0.ipng.ch, chgtg0.ipng.ch. These are router and PoP names, not customer addresses.
• It peers at SwissIX, CommunityIX and CH-IX, and buys transit from several upstreams.

Notable

• A genuinely small operator behind a very low AS number — and the low number is not inherited pedigree. IPng acquired AS8298 by transfer in 2021 and migrated its network onto it, retiring the AS number it had been using.
• The address space is servers and network equipment, not eyeball or subscriber space, so it should geolocate to Swiss datacentre sites rather than to end users.

Interesting

• The number's earlier life is unusual: it had been lent in 2003 to SixXS, the long-running free IPv6 tunnel-broker project, which was not a legal entity and so held it through a sponsoring LIR (Easynet, later absorbed by Sky). When SixXS shut down the number was free to move on. An IPv6 project's AS number ending up with an IPv6-enthusiast operator is a neat piece of continuity.