Is Softbank an ISP or a Hosting company?

[SumGuy]

I'm trying to figure out if the Japanese entity know as Softbank is an ISP or some sort of hosting company (like AWS).

Softbank AS17676 has over 43 million allocated IP's. Would you expect to ever get legit web-hits (ie not a bot or machine-generated hit) from a Softbank IP?

The Softbank IP's that I'm currently blocking seem to usually resolve to something.panda-world.ne.jp. I can't find any coherent or useful information as to what sort of entity panda-world.ne.jp is.

[LifeinAsia]

I've been seeing a lot of non-human hits from Softbank lately and have been debating blocking the entire ranges. But like you, I don't have enough info to pull the trigger yet.

[lucy24]

Look at (a) the pattern of requests: page-only, or the whole package, and (b) headers.

Is that Softbank as in “Nation-wide Network of Softbank BB Corp.”? I didn’t recognize the name, but at some time I must have looked them up, as I find a few ranges with that allocation:
126/8
218.112/12
218.128/12
220.0/10
221.16-119
(Some of those are a bit wonky-looking, suggesting that the real ranges are probably wider.) fwiw, I don't think I've ever met an ISP that controls an entire /8.

:: brief run through logs ::

Mix, mix, mix. 126 definitely has both humans and robots. And, while looking, I found a smalltime image scraper at 218.145.218, but that's outside the range I was supposed to be searching.