AS10563 ROCHELLEUTILITIES

A city-owned utility that is also its town's internet provider. Rochelle Municipal Utilities is the municipal utility of Rochelle, Illinois, running electricity, water and water reclamation, and it added a communications division that today delivers fibre broadband. The handle is ROCHELLEUTILITIES.

What it's used for

Municipal broadband access. RIS sees 3 announced IPv4 prefixes carrying 768 addresses (204.8.160.0/24, 204.8.162.0/24 and 204.8.165.0/24), no IPv6, and one observed neighbour.

The reverse DNS confirms the role and puts the space in the operator's own hands: sampled addresses answer as 005.rmu165.rochelle.net, 133.rmu165.rochelle.net and 005.rochelle.net. rmu is the utility's own initials, rochelle.net is its own zone, and the numeric-leading names are per-address entries in subscriber space. This is an eyeball network serving homes and businesses in one Illinois city, not a hosting or transit operation.

Notable

The three /24s are non-contiguous slices of 204.8.0.0/16 rather than one block, which is what you get when a small operator picks up space in stages over the years.

RMU is one of a long tail of American municipal utilities that got into the internet business through the same door: it already had poles, conduit, a service territory and a billing relationship with every household in town, so building fibre was an extension of what it did rather than a new venture. Its network began with dial-up and grew into wireless and then fibre.