Every public IP address used in the UAE traces back to one organisation: the RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. It allocates IPv4 and IPv6 blocks and AS numbers to its members — internet providers, hosting companies, universities, government entities and large businesses — and publishes every allocation, with the holder’s country, in a daily file. We download that file and the global routing table ourselves; the figures below are from our build of October 2026.
How much address space is registered in the UAE
- IPv4: about 7.27 million addresses in 1,302 blocks are registered to holders in the UAE. The oldest delegation on record dates from 1988.
- IPv6: 597 blocks, together the equivalent of 4,451 /32 networks — far more addresses than IPv4 will ever have.
- AS numbers: 218 are registered in the UAE. 162 of them announce routes in the global routing table, and 53 of those also announce IPv6 routes.
Who announces it
An autonomous system (AS) is one network with its own routing policy. Ranked by the IPv4 space they originate in our copy of the BGP table, two networks dominate:
- AS5384, Emirates Telecommunications Group (Etisalat, trading as e&), with over 7 million IPv4 addresses;
- AS15802, Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (du), with over 2 million.
Behind them come many hosting and cloud companies — a large share of them in the free zones — and public-sector networks such as the federal government network of the TDRA (AS202024) and the Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (AS201678). The full ranking is on the UAE page, and any network can be explored with the ASN lookup.
Registered, announced and used are different things
The numbers don’t add up neatly, and they shouldn’t: a UAE-registered block can be announced by a foreign network or used abroad, and a UAE network can announce space registered elsewhere. That is why our lookup results show registration, routing and geolocation separately — see How IP geolocation works.
RPKI: how well UAE routes are protected
With RPKI, the holder of a block publishes a signed statement (a ROA) saying which AS may announce it, and networks that validate drop announcements that contradict it. Of the 3,674 routes UAE networks announced in our data, about 95 % were RPKI-valid, one was invalid, and the rest had no ROA. Check any route with the RPKI validator.
IPv6
IPv6 removes the shortage that forces providers to share IPv4 addresses between customers. Whether your connection has IPv6 depends on your provider, your plan and your router; the IPv6 test shows it in a few seconds.
Sources
- RIPE NCC delegation statistics: ftp.ripe.net/pub/stats/ripencc
- Global routing table: APNIC’s view (thyme.apnic.net)
- Validated ROAs: rpki-client