AS8529 OMANTEL-AS ZOI - Zain Omantel International

OMANTEL-AS is the AS that carries **Omantel's international wholesale

business, now run through Zain Omantel International (ZOI)** — the joint

venture between Kuwait's Zain and Oman's incumbent operator Omantel that

consolidates their international carrier operations.

What it's used for

• Global IP transit and wholesale carriage: ZOI sells connectivity to operators, content networks and data centres across the Middle East and out to the rest of the world over Oman's subsea-cable landings.
• The AS is the transit path for a large share of regional traffic, rather than a network of end users.

Notable

• The defining number here is not the address count — a modest ~14,000 IPv4 addresses — but the peering fan-out: on the order of 1,800 observed BGP neighbours. That ratio, tiny address space and enormous adjacency, is the fingerprint of a transit carrier: it moves other people's routes, it does not number other people's customers.
• The little rDNS that exists is Omantel router naming (omantel.net.om) plus Akamai cache appliances hosted on-net. There are no subscriber pools; Omantel's Omani retail customers sit on separate ASNs.

Interesting

• Oman's geography is the business case: the country sits beside the Strait of Hormuz on the cable routes between Europe, Africa and Asia, and ZOI's pitch is that it lands more subsea systems than any other operator in the region.