AS9873 TELECOM-LA-AS-AP Lao Telecom Communication, LTC

AS9873 (TELECOM-LA-AS-AP) is held by Lao Telecommunication Public Company (Lao Telecom / LTC), the incumbent telecommunications operator of the Lao PDR and a joint venture between the Lao government and Shenington Investments. This is the carrier's main internet-facing AS.

What it's used for

Lao Telecom sells fixed-line, broadband, IPTV and mobile service across the country, and AS9873 is where that traffic reaches the internet. RIS sees 110 IPv4 prefixes carrying 29,696 addresses, plus 11 IPv6 prefixes, with 45 observed BGP neighbours. The shape is characteristic of a national incumbent in a small market: the address footprint is dominated by two large legacy blocks (115.84.64.0/18 and 202.137.128.0/19) with the remainder of the table made up of long-standing /24s, and the neighbour count is well into the dozens without approaching the hundreds or thousands that a wholesale transit carrier accumulates. That mix says the AS is mostly carrying Lao Telecom's own subscribers and enterprise customers upstream, while also exchanging routes regionally and with domestic peers.

Notable

• IPv6 is deployed and visible in the global table under 2400:aa00::/32, announced as a set of more-specific /40s and a /48.
• The total announced IPv4 space is under 30,000 addresses for a national operator serving a country of several million, which implies heavy reliance on carrier-grade NAT for mobile and broadband subscribers — a common pattern for late-growth Asian markets that never received large legacy allocations.
• Because the network is both a mobile carrier and a fixed-line ISP, addresses in it can look like either; the AS does not separate mobile and fixed into distinct ASNs.