Autonomous system
AS8303 WDR-AS
Unclassified RIPE
Summary
Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln (WDR)
enterprise media legacy
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
/16belong 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
/16on 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.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
No exchange port on file. Many exchanges publish no participant list, so this is not proof of absence.
Transit providers
1 upstream, 0 downstream and 1 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
| AS | Network | Paths seen |
|---|---|---|
| AS43623 | Hessischer Rundfunk | 59 |
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-18, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 14 prefixes · 64.77K addresses IPv6 0 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| DE | Germany | 14 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- RIPE
- Handle
AS8303- Registry name
- WDR-AS
- Registrant
- AS8303-MNT
- Abuse contact
- abuse@wdr.de
- Registered
- 2002-08-28
- Last changed
- 2025-09-11
- Allocation
- allocated
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 100% valid · 1 valid, 0 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 3 authorising AS8303
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 1 of 1 announcements
- Route objects
- 1 naming AS8303
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 443 networks and 1,784 prefixes, as published 2026-10-19. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere