AS10674 GRUCOM

GRUCOM is GRUCom, the telecommunications arm of Gainesville Regional Utilities, the municipally owned utility of Gainesville, Florida. GRU built fibre through Alachua County to run its own electric grid, and GRUCom sells the surplus: internet access, data transport, dark fibre, colocation, cellular backhaul and public-safety radio across north-central Florida.

What it's used for

Both halves of the evidence need reading here, and they say different things.

The AS announces 10 IPv4 prefixes totalling 31,488 addresses plus a single IPv6 /32, and RIS sees 33 observed neighbours. Thirty-three is well past enterprise territory. It is the peering fan-out of a genuine regional carrier that interconnects with other networks rather than simply buying a couple of transit links.

But the reverse DNS shows what the addresses actually carry, and much of it is subscribers. Both of the large /19s sample under apt.gru.net, with names like 66-231-128-5.apt.gru.net and 64-238-176-5.ksg.apt.gru.net: apt is apartments. GRUCom does not generally sell to individual homes, but it does sell bulk internet to apartment complexes, and that product is what most of this space is numbered for. The people at the other end are ordinary residential users. Elsewhere the pack shows cns.gig.gru.net, the operator's own service infrastructure, and a customer's cache server on a third-party domain.

Notable

This is why classification follows the inventory rather than the business model. On paper GRUCom is a wholesale fibre and transport company owned by an electric utility. In the routing table, the bulk of its addresses are an eyeball network, and traffic sourced from them behaves like consumer broadband.

Interesting

The /32 of IPv6 and the municipal-broadband origin story go together. Gainesville was an early US example of a city-owned utility turning grid fibre into a public gigabit network, and the ASN carries both the grid's own communications and the commercial service that grew out of it.