AS8422 NETCOLOGNE

NETCOLOGNE is NetCologne GmbH, the city carrier of Cologne and the

surrounding Rhineland. It is one of Germany's largest municipal-utility-backed

telecoms, running its own fibre, cable and DSL access network rather than reselling

Deutsche Telekom's.

What it's used for

• Residential broadband and telephony across Cologne, Bonn, Leverkusen and the Rhine-Erft area, plus business connectivity and services for the region's schools and public bodies.
• The reverse DNS is decisive: subscriber addresses resolve as cable-IP-ADDR.nc.de and xdsl-IP-ADDR.nc.de across the big 78.34.0.0/15, 87.78.0.0/15 and 89.0.0.0/15 blocks.

Notable

• A genuine eyeball network of roughly 570,000 IPv4 addresses, with heavy IPv6 deployment alongside it. Addresses here overwhelmingly front households in one German metropolitan region, so they geolocate tightly to Cologne.
• Its peering footprint is unusually large for a regional carrier: it is a long-standing presence at DE-CIX and neighbouring exchanges, which is how a city network keeps local traffic local.

Interesting

• NetCologne grew out of the city's public utility company, a distinctly German model in which the municipal power and water provider also lays the fibre. That is why an operator this size exists at all in a market otherwise dominated by national incumbents.