AS9544 PIP-AS-AP Clarenston TA Preferred Internet Provider

AS9544 (PIP-AS-AP) is held by Clarenston Pty Ltd, trading as Preferred Internet Provider (PIP), a Sydney-based internet and managed-IT provider. The registry name looks opaque, but the reverse DNS settles it immediately: the space resolves under pip.com.au, and the company today sells business-grade NBN and fibre connectivity, managed IT, private cloud and Microsoft 365 services to Australian organisations.

What it's used for

This is a small independent ISP, and the evidence is unusually legible. RIS sees 8 IPv4 prefixes — every one a /24, 2,048 addresses in total — and no IPv6. The blocks all come from Australia's legacy 203.x ranges (203.23.120.0/24, 203.24.52.0/24, 203.27.90.0/24, 203.34.24.0/24 and neighbours), the sort of space allocated to Australian providers well before the region tightened up.

The reverse DNS shows the network doing exactly what an ISP does. There are infrastructure names (peer-gw.pip.com.au, clients-router5.pip.com.au, pip2.pip.com.au), and there are subscriber-facing ones — adslh-203.23.120.133.pip.com.au and adslb-static-203-24-52-133.pip.com.au are ADSL customer addresses, including static assignments. Alongside those, some addresses carry customer-branded PTRs like armsgroup.com.au and nc.topthis.com.au, which is what hosted or dedicated business customers look like.

Nine BGP neighbours on 2,048 addresses is a respectable amount of interconnection for a network this size, and reflects an ISP that peers to keep its transit bill down.

Notable

• The ADSL-era reverse DNS is still in place even though the business has moved on to NBN and fibre.
• No IPv6 is announced.