AS9559 PLAINCOM-NZ Plain Communications Ltd

AS9559 (PLAINCOM-NZ) is held by Plain Communications Ltd, a long-established independent internet provider based in Canterbury, on New Zealand's South Island. The company sells internet connectivity to personal and business customers along with web hosting, web design and related services, and it describes itself as the oldest full ISP in Canterbury.

What it's used for

This is a small regional ISP that is also a web host, and the reverse DNS shows both halves of the business plainly. RIS sees 8 IPv4 prefixes carrying 2,560 addresses, with no IPv6: 202.49.64.0/21 as the anchor, several /24s carved out of it (202.49.66.0, 202.49.68.0 through 202.49.71.0), plus 202.49.140.0/24 and 202.36.174.0/24 from New Zealand's legacy 202.x allocations.

The sampled addresses resolve two ways. Some carry generic per-address names — 202-49-70-5.plain.net.nz, 202-49-66-133.plain.net.nz — which is how an ISP labels customer connections and statically assigned addresses. Others are named servers and hosted websites: osol1.plain.net.nz, monotony.plain.co.nz, and customer sites like www.backpack.co.nz and www.ate.co.nz sitting directly on the provider's space. That mix is characteristic of an older, full-service ISP that never split its access and hosting businesses onto separate networks.

Three BGP neighbours on 2,560 addresses is a modest, sensible amount of interconnection for a provider of this size: enough upstreams for resilience, no ambition to sell transit.

Notable

• Plain was among the first New Zealand providers to offer commercial web hosting, which is consistent with customer websites still living on its own address space.
• No IPv6 is announced from this AS.