AS14988 — BTC-GATE1

AS14988 announces 2 IPv4 prefixes covering 65,792 addresses and 2 IPv6 prefixes.

About this network

A national incumbent whose every registry record comes back with no netname and no registrant at all.

What it's used for

• Botswana's incumbent telecom operator. 65,792 addresses across 52 IPv4 prefixes plus two IPv6 prefixes, with 17 observed BGP neighbours. All 54 announced blocks are attributed to Botswana.

Notable

• Every prefix looked up returned netname=unknown registrant=unknown. The records exist; the fields are empty.
• Almost all 52 prefixes sit inside 168.167, announced in pieces from /19 down to /22.
• The two IPv6 prefixes are 2001:43f8:17c0::/48 and 2c0f:ff00::/32.
• Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.
• One lookup, for 168.167.64.0/21, failed outright, which is a different thing from an empty record.

Interesting

• Most networks in this corpus give something away in the registry: a city, a department, a ticket number. This one gives nothing, across every block, and the address space still routes fine. Netnames are a convention rather than a requirement, and a registry that never enforced them ends up with records that identify a block and describe nobody.
• Fifty-two announcements out of one sixteen-bit range is a lot of deaggregation for a single country. Splitting advertises which pieces go where, and it also keeps a piece reachable when a link to one part of the network drops.
• The /48 is a single-site allocation sitting beside a /32 that could hold a nation. Two requests, decades apart in intent.

This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy.

Announced prefixes

• 102.205.122.0/24
• 168.167.0.0/16
• 2001:43f8:17c0::/48
• 2c0f:ff00::/32

Upstream networks

• AS37678 BOTSWANA FIBRE NETWORKS (Proprietary) Limited
• AS33763 Paratus Telecommunications Limited
• AS30844 Liquid Telecommunications Ltd
• AS6939 Hurricane Electric LLC
• AS37721 Virtual Technologies & Solutions

Downstream networks

• AS10798 The Standard Bank of South Africa (Proprietary) Limited
• AS14789 Cloudflare, Inc.
• AS328869 Bank Gaborone Limited

Adjacent networks

• AS37678 BOTSWANA FIBRE NETWORKS (Proprietary) Limited
• AS33763 Paratus Telecommunications Limited
• AS30844 Liquid Telecommunications Ltd
• AS10798 The Standard Bank of South Africa (Proprietary) Limited
• AS14789 Cloudflare, Inc.
• AS328869 Bank Gaborone Limited
• AS6939 Hurricane Electric LLC
• AS37721 Virtual Technologies & Solutions

Internet exchanges

• NAPAfrica IX Johannesburg — Johannesburg, South Africa