AS8393 ASTEL-AS Alma-Ata

ASTEL-AS is JSC Astel, a Kazakh telecom operator headquartered in Almaty

and operating since the early 1990s. It is best known as the country's largest

VSAT satellite operator, and it sells corporate connectivity, telephony and

internet across Kazakhstan and neighbouring Central Asian states.

What it's used for

• Corporate and enterprise connectivity. The registry says so plainly: prefixes carry netnames and descriptions like Customers of ASTEL in Pavlodar, and others are city-scoped to places such as Shymkent, which is how a business ISP labels the blocks it assigns to customer sites.
• Satellite links to remote sites, which in Kazakhstan means oil and gas fields, mining, banking branches and government offices far from any fibre.
• Cloud and datacentre services, visible as a prefix simply netnamed iaas.

Notable

• A business-focused ISP, not an eyeball network. The inventory is about 80 scattered /24s and roughly 21,000 addresses, the shape of an operator handing small blocks to many corporate sites rather than running consumer pools.
• There is no published reverse DNS across the space, so the netnames are the evidence here rather than host naming.
• The scattered /24s across several RIPE ranges could be mistaken for an address-broker inventory, but they are not: the blocks are consistently Kazakhstan-registered under the operator's own LIR, with coherent city and customer descriptions.

Interesting

• Satellite-first operators are the exception rather than the rule, and they exist where geography makes terrestrial networks impractical. Kazakhstan, with an area larger than Western Europe and a very low population density, is exactly that.