AS8638 VERSATEL-NRW servicing all companies of Versatel AG

1&1 Versatel GmbH (VERSATEL-NRW) — a subordinate AS of the German fixed-line

operator, described in the registry as servicing the former **TROPOLYS Region

West**, i.e. the North Rhine-Westphalia footprint Versatel absorbed.

What it's used for

• Broadband access for end users in the region. Every sampled address resolves under versanet.de with the classic German hex-encoded dynamic naming (iHHHHHHHH.versanet.de, where the eight hex digits encode the IPv4 address itself) — the signature of a dynamically assigned DSL pool.
• The RIPE objects agree: the covering block is VT-CUSTOMER, and the route object on it is literally described as VT-DYNAMICPOOL.

Notable

• Small for an eyeball network at roughly 1,800 addresses across four prefixes, and single-homed to the Versatel backbone. This is a regional access ASN, not the group's main network — 1&1 Versatel's larger enterprise and carrier business rides other ASNs.
• versanet.de is a fossil of Versanet, the Bochum-based provider that became part of Versatel; the rDNS zone outlived the brand by many years.

Interesting

• The hex rDNS convention is worth recognising on sight. It costs the operator nothing to generate, tells a support engineer the IP without a lookup, and is a reliable tell for German consumer DSL space across several unrelated ISPs.