AS9744 XLC-AS-AP XLC GLOBAL

AS9744 (XLC-AS-AP) is registered to XLC GLOBAL Limited, a Hong Kong company that sells server hosting and multi-carrier connectivity into Greater China and the wider Asia-Pacific. In PeeringDB it lists itself as a Network Service Provider with global scope, mostly-outbound traffic and a 100G port at HKIX.

What it's used for

The self-description and the actual routing do not line up, and the routing is the honest half. RIS sees just 3 IPv4 prefixes totalling 1,280 addresses — 103.127.24.0/22, a more-specific 103.127.25.0/24 inside it, and a lone legacy 203.33.189.0/24 — with no IPv6 origin and 10 observed BGP neighbours. That is a small footprint for a self-declared global NSP. The ten neighbours are the one thing that fits the story: a network with a thousand-odd addresses does not normally touch ten peers, so this AS really is used for interconnection, likely as the peering identity fronting a hosting and China-transit business whose bulk address space is announced from other ASNs. The single /24 held apart from the /22 is a legacy fragment rather than part of any coherent aggregate.

Notable

• Treat marketing scale claims for this operator with caution. Whatever the wider XLC business announces elsewhere, AS9744 itself originates a very small inventory.
• The mix of a modern APNIC 103.x block with an isolated legacy 203.x /24 suggests the number and some of the space have changed hands over time; do not build a history claim on the low ASN.
• Peering at HKIX with mostly-outbound traffic is consistent with a hosting/content-serving posture rather than an eyeball or enterprise access network.