Summary

  • PeakFiber Broadband LLC holds autonomous system AS402128 (PEAKFIBER-01), allocated 2026-01-21, announcing a single IPv4 prefix, 167.254.192.0/21 (2,048 addresses), with no IPv6, per registry mirrors https://whois.ipip.net/AS402128.
  • The federal SAM record for the Bellefontaine operator names a differently constituted legal entity, Logan County Gig LLC doing business as PEAK FIBER, and the relationship between that entity and PeakFiber Broadband LLC is not established in any retained public source https://opengovus.com/sam-entity/NGDHCMWUDZ36.
  • Aunalytics, Inc (AS36443) appears as the network's upstream, and active peering at Ohio IX is listed but unconfirmed by the exchange's own peering-matrix caveat https://www.bigdatacloud.com/asn-lookup/AS402128 https://ipinfo.io/AS402128/167.254.192.0/21.
  • The company's operating commitments that can be verified are narrow: one ASN, one /21, one upstream, a set of marketed fiber tiers and a December 2025 partnership announcement. Everything beyond that — customer counts, traffic, federal awards, second upstreams, IPv6 — remains unproven in public record.

PeakFiber Broadband LLC is a small Ohio fiber operator whose public identity splits into two halves that do not yet fit together. On one side sits a registry footprint that is unusually young and unusually thin. On the other sits a brand that markets symmetrical fiber service of up to 9 gigabits, claims 24/7/365 support, and, per its own December 2025 announcements, has been serving customers for years.

The economically interesting question is not whether PeakFiber exists — it plainly does — but which of its visible commitments have become effective, which remain merely registered or announced, and what conditions must occur before a thin registry record becomes a defensible market position.

The state change: an ASN that did not exist a year ago

The most consequential state difference on the record is straightforward. Before January 2026, there was no PeakFiber autonomous system. The ARIN organization record mirrored by third-party aggregators names PeakFiber Broadband LLC, organization identifier PBL-80, at 1213 West Sandusky Ave., Bellefontaine, Ohio 43311, with an organization registration date of 2025-11-21 and a last-update date of 2025-12-10 https://ipgeolocation.io/browse/asn/AS402128. The corresponding AS-level record for AS402128, named PEAKFIBER-01, carries an allocation date of 2026-01-21 in the same mirrors https://whois.ipip.net/AS402128. The mirrors render the organization and AS dates inconsistently in places, so both dates should be read as approximate registry milestones rather than certified events; the ARIN registry record itself was not directly retrieved in this investigation.

What the network announces is correspondingly thin. Aggregators report exactly one announced IPv4 route, 167.254.192.0/21, covering 2,048 addresses, and zero IPv6 prefixes https://whois.ipip.net/AS402128. The prefix is reported as RPKI-valid, covered by a route origin authorization naming PeakFiber Broadband LLC, with the ARIN organization handle PBL-80 as the registry identifier https://ipinfo.io/AS402128/167.254.192.0/21. PeeringDB, a self-reported registry, carries the network under the PEAKFIBER-01 name with the same organization https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/402128, and the organization-level entry mirrors the same identifier https://www.peeringdb.com/org/44359.

Two features of this footprint matter for any economic reading. First, the address space is small by the standards of a retail ISP: 2,048 IPv4 addresses cannot plausibly face a mass-market subscriber base on their own, which implies either carrier-grade network address translation, address space obtained outside this announcement, or a subscriber base whose scale remains unknown. Second, the ASN is brand new as a routing entity even though the company's own testimonial content claims customers of two to five years' standing https://ixpmanager.ohioix.net/index.php/peering-matrix. Both facts can be true at once only if the brand previously served customers under a different network arrangement — most plausibly as a retail operator riding on another provider's infrastructure — before standing up its own routing identity. The registry dates, in other words, tell us when the company became independently visible in the routing table, not when it started selling service.

What a routing table can and cannot prove

An autonomous system allocation, an RPKI-valid ROA and a live route announcement are genuinely effective commitments. They cost money and administrative effort, they create ongoing obligations, and they change what the operator can do: originate its own prefixes, contract for its own transit, and participate in exchange points on its own name. In that sense the ASN is real. It is the clearest effective commitment in the entire public record.

But a routing identity proves nothing about the commercial substance behind it. PeeringDB's operator-supplied fields for traffic levels, traffic ratios and geographic scope are shown as Not Disclosed https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/402128 — which is a self-reported field, but its emptiness is at least consistent with a young network that has not yet accumulated the traffic to describe. Aggregated BGP data shows AS402128 receiving service from AS36443, Aunalytics, Inc, with no downstream peers on record, and ranks the network in the bottom half of global autonomous systems by size https://www.bigdatacloud.com/asn-lookup/AS402128. The direction of dependency is the salient fact: PeakFiber is buying transit, and it has no visible customers of its own in the routing economy.

The upstream itself carries a lesson about concentration. Aunalytics — an Indiana-based managed-services and fiber provider that also appears in the data as a listed peer — experienced a fiber cut between Bellefontaine and Plain City, per a public incident tracker entry https://members.logancountyohio.com/list/member/peakfiber-9089. An incident of that kind does not establish any ongoing problem for PeakFiber, but it illustrates the structural exposure of a single-upstream regional ISP: when the only physical path out of town fails, the operator's entire service area fails with it, regardless of how good its last-mile fiber is.

The entity-name problem, stated precisely

Here the reporting must be careful, because the public record contains two names for what may or may not be one company. The federal System for Award Management record, as mirrored by OpenGovUS, identifies the legal operator as Logan County Gig LLC doing business as PEAK FIBER, with UEI NGDHCMWUDZ36, at 1213 W Sandusky Ave, Bellefontaine, OH 43311-1046 https://bellefontaine.ohiodailydigital.com/news/peakfiber-broadband-becomes-first-richwood-coffee-corporate-partner-of-richwood-coffee. That record shows a business start date of 2021-09-01, Delaware incorporation structured as a partnership or limited liability partnership, an officer listed as Mark A Miller, CFO, and a registration purpose of Z1 — Federal Assistance Awards, meaning the entity registered specifically to become eligible for federal grants. Its SAM registration dates from 2025-08-21, expiring 2026-08-21, with the mirror showing a status of Expired as of retrieval https://opengovus.com/sam-entity/NGDHCMWUDZ36.

Meanwhile ARIN, PeeringDB and the IP registries name the resource holder PeakFiber Broadband LLC. The address is the same; the name is not. No retained source establishes a formation document, a d/b/a filing, an asset purchase or any other instrument connecting Logan County Gig LLC and PeakFiber Broadband LLC. This article therefore treats the relationship as an open question, and it explicitly declines to resolve it by assumption. Three readings are compatible with the evidence: Logan County Gig LLC may have rebranded and re-registered its network assets under the PeakFiber name; the two may be related entities in a family structure, a hypothesis supported by sibling PUCO tariff dockets for Little Miami Gig LLC and Belmont County Gig LLC opened the same day https://whois.ipip.net/AS402128); or they may be distinct persons with an undisclosed commercial relationship. Each reading has different implications for who actually holds the customer contracts, the tariff rights and any future grant eligibility, and none can be confirmed from the public record now available.

A separate name-collision caution applies to a personal-directory record retained in this run's research set, which surfaces a person-page aggregator entry that cannot be tied by the retained evidence to any named individual associated with the company. It is cited here only as an identified ambiguity, not as a fact about any person https://isdown.app/status/aunalytics/incidents/625985-fiber-issue-between-bellefontaine-and-plain-city.

Administrative credentials are not market position

Three of the company's visible artifacts — the SAM registration, the PUCO tariff docket and the Ohio IX membership — are best understood as credentials held, not as evidence of effective market position.

The SAM registration is a prerequisite for federal money, not evidence of having received any. Its stated purpose, Z1 Federal Assistance Awards, tells us the entity positioned itself to apply for grants; nothing in the retained record shows an award. Ohio's broadband funding pipeline is real and large: the state's BEAD Final Proposal, revised April 2026, describes a multi-year subsidy program that regional ISPs compete to access https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/broadband.ohio.gov/bead/BBOH_BEAD_Final_Proposal_Revised_April_2026.pdf. But eligibility is the beginning of that process, not the end, and a tariff-and-grants paper trail does not build lit fiber. Likewise, the PUCO's 2025 annual-report filers list is a compliance context document retained for background; no award, exemption or PeakFiber-specific determination is asserted from it https://whois.ipip.net/AS402128).

The PUCO docket tells a similar story. Docket 90-6454-TP-TRF for Logan County Gig LLC was opened on 2021-11-23 under the telephone industry code and the commission-approved final tariffs purpose, and it remains open, per the PUCO open tariff-docket listing (source). A tariff docket is a regulatory registration step — it lets an incumbent-style operator file retail terms with the state — and it is not evidence of construction, subscribers or revenue. Notably, it was opened in November 2021, consistent with the SAM-recorded 2021 business start and with the conclusion that the operating business predates its own ASN by more than four years.

The Ohio IX peering matrix lists PEAKFIBER-01 / AS402128 as a member network https://www.bigdatacloud.com/asn-lookup/AS402128. But the matrix page itself cautions that a listed member may not be actively peering and may have opted out of showing data, and it measures only bidirectional TCP flows on the exchange LAN. Membership is a credential; live peering sessions, settlement-free or otherwise, would be the effective fact, and they are unconfirmed.

What the company claims, and how to weigh it

The company's own marketing is internally coherent and, read as a set of claims rather than findings, informative. The website describes a 100 percent fiber-optic network with no contracts and no teaser rates, symmetrical tiers named Trailhead (0.25 Gbps), Waypoint (0.5 Gbps), Basecamp (1 Gbps), Timberline (3 Gbps), Summit (6 Gbps) and Yeti (9 Gbps), managed Wi-Fi under the PeakFiberIQ and PeakMesh names, and staffed-around-the-clock support https://ixpmanager.ohioix.net/index.php/peering-matrix. A December 2025 release, republished locally on 2025-12-17, announced PeakFiber as the first corporate partner of Richwood Coffee and quoted Jake Minnich, identified as President and co-founder, describing the company as locally owned and as the area's only 100 percent fiber-optic broadband provider with Logan County offices and team members https://peakfiber.net/ https://richwoodcoffee.com/peakfiber-broadband-becomes-first-richwood-coffee-corporate-partner-of-richwood-coffee/.

Three caveats attach. The exclusivity claim — the area's only all-fiber provider — is a competitive assertion by an interested party, and nothing retained independently verifies it. The customer testimonials claiming two to five years of service predate every registry artifact and therefore document the brand's history under some earlier network arrangement, not the independent AS's. And the entire tier structure, up to 9-gigabit symmetry in a county seat of roughly 14,000 people, is a capability claim that only traffic and subscriber counts could confirm — numbers the company does not disclose.

The company's civic embeddedness is nonetheless visible from independent directions. It appears in the Logan County chamber's member directory https://www.ntca.org/organizations/peakfiber-broadband, is listed as a member organization by NTCA, the rural broadband association https://www.growlogancounty.com/why-logan-county.html, and appears in county economic-development material positioning Logan County as a connectivity-relevant business location https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/puco.ohio.gov/empliibrary/files/OPA/Website%20files/Financial%20Assestments%20-%20Annual%20Reports/2025_Annual_Report_Filers_List.pdf. A third-party business listing and a mapping-service entry reproduce the same Bellefontaine address https://exa.ai/library/person/vg5vm8xw2fc https://www.mapquest.com/us/ohio/peakfiber-broadband-715973950. None of this is proof of scale, but it is consistent with an operating business embedded in its community rather than a shelf registration.

The mechanism: how a thin registry becomes a durable position

The economic logic of a small regional fiber ISP is straightforward and unforgiving. Revenue is a function of passings, take rate and price; costs are dominated by capital construction and by transit; and competitive position depends on being the only genuine fiber option, or the best-priced one, in a territory where incumbents' copper and cable have aged. PeakFiber's tier ladder — with a low-cost entry point and a 9-gigabit top end — is a textbook attempt to capture both the price-sensitive household and the small-business buyer who needs symmetry for uploads.

For the registry footprint to convert into market position, several conditions must hold, and each is observable. The company must win subscribers at a take rate sufficient to cover transit from Aunalytics plus its own construction amortization; its Ohio IX membership must mature into real peering, which reduces transit cost and improves latency to regional content; and it must either add upstream diversity or accept the outage risk documented in the Aunalytics fiber incident.

On the financing side, the SAM registration signals an intention to pursue federal subsidy, which for a community-scale operator is often the difference between a viable build and an abandoned one — but an intention is all the record shows.

The falsification test for this article's framing is equally concrete. If documentary evidence emerges — a d/b/a filing, an asset-transfer instrument, a consolidated SAM or PUCO record — tying PeakFiber Broadband LLC to Logan County Gig LLC, the entity-name gap closes and the timeline story resolves into a rebranding. If Ohio IX flow data or a PeeringDB policy change shows active sessions, the interconnection commitment becomes effective. If an award notice or BEAD sub-grantee listing appears, the subsidy question changes character entirely.

Conversely, if the SAM expiration lapses without renewal and the tariff docket closes without filings, the administrative credentials will have decayed while the network kept operating — a different, but also legible, configuration.

What the public record supports today is a narrow but real statement: an Ohio fiber brand with a 2021-registered operating entity, a 2026-allocated autonomous system, one protected prefix, one upstream, a marketed product line, and an open question about which legal person actually stands behind the name on the door.

https://btw.media/en/directory/peakfiber-broadband-llc-4dab3fe8af290781