AS8426 CLARANET-AS ClaraNET LTD

CLARANET-AS is Claranet Limited, a London-headquartered managed-services group

operating across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Benelux and

beyond. It started in the 1990s as an internet service provider and is now primarily

a managed hosting, cloud and network provider for businesses.

What it's used for

• Managed hosting and cloud workloads run on behalf of corporate customers, plus business connectivity. Customer addresses resolve under per-country subdomains such as host-IP-ADDR.customer.es.clara.net, and the operator's own infrastructure sits under noc.clara.net.
• Roughly 900,000 IPv4 addresses across around 80 prefixes, with a broad IPv6 footprint and a very large peering fan-out for a non-carrier.

Notable

• This is not eyeball space. There are no subscriber pools in the reverse DNS. An address here is far more likely to be a hosted server or a company office than a home connection, despite Claranet's ISP origins.
• Many prefixes carry the reverse DNS of acquired ISPs rather than Claranet's own domain, and a good deal of the range answers unallocated or has no rDNS at all. Claranet grew largely by buying up national providers, and the routing table still shows the seams.
• Customer domains appear directly in the rDNS, which means some prefixes will geolocate and attribute to the customer, not to Claranet.

Interesting

• The clara.net domain is one of the older commercial names still in daily use on the European internet, dating from the company's dial-up era and surviving every rebrand since.