AS8781 QA-ISP

QA-ISP is Ooredoo Q.S.C. — Qatar's incumbent telecom operator, known as Qtel until the 2013 rebrand, and still the country's dominant carrier. This is the AS behind qatar.net.qa.

What it's used for

It is Qatar's main eyeball network. AS8781 announces roughly 667,000 IPv4 addresses across 151 prefixes plus 11 IPv6 prefixes — a very large footprint for a country of under three million people — and carries fixed broadband, fibre-to-the-home and mobile data for the great majority of Qatari subscribers. Peering databases rank it first in the country by estimated eyeballs, with a customer population around 1.8 million.

The sampled reverse DNS lands on be-10-rec-gw5.qatar.net.qa, a bundle-Ethernet gateway router in the operator's own domain: backbone naming, as expected at the edge of a carrier's address space.

Notable

• 126 observed BGP neighbours. That is a transit-carrier's peering profile as much as an ISP's, and it reflects Ooredoo's role as one of the Gulf's international gateways: it lands submarine cables and sells wholesale capacity onward, not just retail access.
• The AS has been in the routing table since RIS records begin, originating 212.77.194.0/24 in 2000 under the Qtel name.
• Ooredoo Group is a large multinational with operations across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, but this AS is the Qatari domestic network specifically; the group's other markets are numbered separately.

Interesting

The fixed and mobile sides of the business share this one AS, which is why it resists a clean split between residential and mobile — a single Qatari household's broadband line and phone can both be numbered out of the same estate.