AS8937 SALINK-AS Saarland

SALINK-AS is VSE NET GmbH, the telecommunications arm of the Saarland

regional utility group VSE. It describes itself as the leading provider of

communications and data services in the Saarland, and the handle is simply

Saarland link.

What it's used for

• Business and carrier services: fibre connectivity, virtual PBX, managed firewalls and DDoS protection, datacentre and virtual-server hosting, plus fibre-rollout work for municipalities and the public sector.
• Roughly 10,700 IPv4 addresses, mostly the 212.18.192.0/19 block with a few older 192.x/193.24.x /24s. Announced from a small number of prefixes with no IPv6.

Notable

• rDNS across the whole /19 is a single generated pattern: NNN-NNN-NNN-NNN.ip-addr.vsenet.de, with the octets reversed and zero-padded. There are no dsl-, pppoe- or dynamic-pool conventions anywhere, which is what separates this from a consumer eyeball network.
• The utility-owned regional carrier is a common German shape: a Stadtwerke or regional energy company that already owns ducts and rights of way turns them into a fibre business aimed at companies, public bodies and other carriers.

Interesting

• The old 192.109.199.0/24 and 192.54.36.0/24 blocks it still announces are early European allocations, far older than the 212.18 range that carries the bulk of the network — remnants that a regional carrier keeps because renumbering customers is never worth it.