AS8449 AS8449-ELCAT

ElCat Ltd. (AS8449-ELCAT) — a Kyrgyz telecom operator based in Bishkek,

operating since 1994 and one of the country's oldest and largest internet

providers, with its own fibre backbone.

What it's used for

• IP transit, dedicated channels and IP VPN for corporate customers, government organisations and other Kyrgyz operators, including the country's cellular carriers.
• The address space reflects that: static assignments under NAME.static.elcat.kg, named customer hosts (global-tours.elcat.kg, netsolution.elcat.kg), voice gear (gkbox1.voip.kg) and access gateways. Generic sequential names of the form IP-ADDR-IP-ADDR.elcat.kg cover the rest.

Notable

• Despite being a household ISP name in Kyrgyzstan, the inventory and the company's own description are business-first: corporate connectivity, operator transit and cross-border capacity, not mass-market broadband pools. There are no dial-up, DSL or dynamic-subscriber naming conventions anywhere in the sampled rDNS.
• Well peered for its size — roughly 16,000 IPv4 addresses but dozens of BGP neighbours, which is what an operator-of-operators looks like.

Interesting

• ElCat built the first cross-border fibre link from Kyrgyzstan into Kazakhstan (Bishkek to Kordai) in 2009. In a landlocked, mountainous country, whoever owns the border crossings owns the internet economics.