AS9471 ONATI-AS-AP ONATI

AS9471 (ONATI-AS-AP) is held by ONATi, the incumbent telecommunications operator of French Polynesia and a subsidiary of the territory's state-owned OPT (Office des Postes et Télécommunications). ONATi was formed in 2013 by merging OPT's subsidiaries Tikiphone, TNS and Mana, the long-standing Polynesian internet provider — and Mana is the name still stamped all over this network's reverse DNS.

What it's used for

This is an eyeball network, and the rDNS says so unambiguously. Sampled addresses across four different prefixes resolve to names like 5.64.50.123.dsl.dyn.mana.pf and 5.80.21.50.abo.mana.pf: dsl.dyn for dynamically assigned DSL subscriber lines, abo (French abonné, subscriber) for account-held addresses. These are households and small businesses in Tahiti and the outer islands.

RIS observes 219 IPv4 prefixes covering roughly 63,000 addresses, 4 IPv6 prefixes, and only 1 BGP neighbour. That combination is the tell of an island incumbent: substantial subscriber-scale address space, deaggregated hard into hundreds of small announcements, all reaching the internet through a single upstream path. A territory 4,000 km from the nearest mainland has no local peering fabric to speak of; connectivity runs over submarine cable, and ONATi operates the Honotua system that carries it.

One sampled address resolves to cache.google.com — a Google Global Cache node inside the network, which is what a remote island ISP deploys to keep popular content local rather than dragging every request across the Pacific.

Notable

• ONATi provides fixed line, mobile and broadband across French Polynesia and was ranked the territory's second-largest company by turnover in 2022.
• The single observed neighbour, on a network this size, is a direct consequence of geography: submarine cable capacity, not peering breadth, is the constraint that defines this network.