AS8303 WDR-AS

WDR-AS is Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the public broadcaster for North

Rhine-Westphalia and the largest of the regional corporations that make up

Germany's ARD network. It is headquartered at Appellhofplatz in Cologne, the

address that still appears in the registry object for its address space.

What it's used for

• The broadcaster's own network: newsrooms, studios and production sites, staff IT, and the systems behind its radio, television and online output.
• The AS announces exactly one prefix, 149.219.0.0/16, held directly by WDR and flagged in the RIPE database as legacy space. It is single-homed behind one upstream.

Notable

• Institutional infrastructure, not a service network. There is no subscriber space, no hosting product and no transit here. Addresses in the /16 belong to a broadcasting organisation and its employees.
• Reverse DNS is not published across the block, which is common for large private networks that put very little of a legacy /16 on the public internet.
• A whole class-B block for a single broadcaster is a mark of an early allocation: German public institutions picked up /16s in the era when they were handed out on request, and WDR has kept its.

Interesting

• WDR is a public-law corporation funded by the German broadcasting levy rather than a company or a government department, so it sits awkwardly between the usual categories: publicly constituted, but operationally independent of the state.