AS10695 WAL-MART

WAL-MART is Walmart's own autonomous system, and it is one of the largest purely private enterprise networks on the internet. RIS observes 56 announced IPv4 prefixes carrying roughly 1,511,680 addresses — the great majority of them full /16s — with no IPv6 and only 4 BGP neighbours.

What it's used for

This is corporate and retail-estate networking at continental scale. The announced blocks are consecutive /16s out of 156.84.0.0–156.95.0.0 and 161.164.0.0–161.177.0.0, an unusually clean, contiguous holding that reflects allocations made directly to a very large organisation rather than assembled from scraps. Every address sampled in reverse DNS answers with the bare name walmart.com, a blanket first-party PTR applied across the estate. Space of this shape and size supports stores, distribution centers, point-of-sale systems, back-office sites and internal services — tens of thousands of locations, each needing routable addressing.

Notable

The ratio here is the story. About 1.5 million addresses against just 4 observed BGP neighbours: enormous address consumption, almost no interconnection. That is the definitive enterprise signature, and the exact inverse of a carrier, which peers with hundreds of networks while announcing far less space. Walmart is not selling connectivity to anyone; it is consuming it from a small number of upstreams.

Interesting

The public-facing walmart.com storefront is not what fills this AS. Consumer web traffic is served through CDNs and cloud platforms; this network is the private plumbing behind the world's largest retailer.