AS8948 PRIMO-099

PRIMO-099 is 099 Primo Communications Ltd, an Israeli internet and telephony provider. The "099" is the company's dialling prefix, carried over into its brand and its domain, 099.net.il.

What it's used for

• Consumer internet access. The rDNS is unambiguous: nearly every sampled address resolves to a name of the form 185.120.124.1.NAT-DSL.099.net.il — DSL subscribers behind carrier-grade NAT. Named hosts in the same space are the ISP's own service machines (dns1, ns1, smtp).
• Around 31,000 IPv4 addresses across roughly 20 prefixes, drawn from both RIPE and ARIN space.

Notable

• The NAT-DSL label in the rDNS is the important detail: this network is heavily NAT-ed, so a single address can front many households. Per-address user attribution will be wrong here, and address count badly understates the subscriber base.
• Several of its large ARIN /20s (38.56.224.0/20, 38.229.176.0/20, 206.84.16.0/20 and others) look at first glance like the scattered multi-RIR inventory of an address broker. They are not: ARIN registers them as PRIMO-CGNT-NET-* assignments to 099 Primo Communications itself, out of Cogent's 38.0.0.0/8, and they carry the ISP's own rDNS. This is an ISP that ran out of RIPE space and took CGNAT blocks from its upstream.

Interesting

• Israeli telecom liberalisation produced a crop of providers named after the dialling prefix they were assigned for international calls. Primo is one of the survivors, and the number is still the brand.