AS9648 ASN-OZONLINE-AU # AS-OZONLINE-AU CONVERTED TO ASN-OZONLINE-AU FOR RPSL COMPLIANCE Australia On-Line Pty Ltd

AS9648 (ASN-OZONLINE-AU) is held by Australia On-Line Pty Ltd, an independent Australian ISP trading as OzOnline. It is a survivor of the dial-up era: the company sold hourly dial-up access in the 1990s and has carried through ADSL into the NBN, remaining a small independent retailer rather than being absorbed by one of the large carriers.

What it's used for

This is a national eyeball network. RIS sees 58 IPv4 prefixes totalling 13,312 addresses, no IPv6, and only 5 observed neighbours. The combination is diagnostic: a wholesale carrier of any size peers with hundreds of ASes, so five upstreams against a five-figure address count says the traffic here terminates at end users rather than transiting through to anyone else.

The reverse DNS makes the role explicit and shows the geographic spread. Sampled PTRs return names such as adsl-syd-1-5.ozonline.com.au, adsl-mel-2-5, adsl-bri-3-5, adsl-adl-2-5 and adsl-per-3-5 — access pools tagged by city (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth), alongside as-bri-* names. That is a subscriber-access naming scheme, laid out per point of presence, in every mainland Australian capital. Address space is drawn from a handful of aggregates (202.173.192.0/20, 210.4.224.0/21, 203.23.152.0/21, 203.4.248.0/21) deaggregated into /24s, which is typical of an ISP announcing pools per POP.

Notable

• The # AS-OZONLINE-AU converted to ASN-OZONLINE-AU for RPSL compliance text embedded in the registry name is a 1990s RPSL migration artefact that has stuck to the object ever since.
• adsl- PTR names persist even where the underlying service has moved to NBN; naming schemes outlive the access technology that named them.