AS10879 UHC

UHC is UnitedHealthcare, the health insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group and one of the largest health insurers in the United States. This is a corporate enterprise network, not a service provider.

What it's used for

Carrying the company's own operations. RIS shows 92 announced IPv4 prefixes holding 224,256 addresses, no IPv6 in the routing table, and 13 observed neighbours.

The ratio between those numbers is what identifies the role. A quarter of a million addresses is a large network, but it is reached through barely more than a dozen BGP neighbours. A wholesale carrier with that much space would peer with hundreds or thousands of ASes because selling reachability is the business; here the neighbours are transit suppliers and a few direct connections, which is exactly what a large multi-homed enterprise looks like. The address space serves data centres, offices, claims and clinical systems, and the member-facing web estate rather than customers who buy IP transit.

The single reverse DNS result on the sample lands on a myuhc-style name for a personal-health-record service, one of the member portals UnitedHealthcare operates for employer plan members. That is consistent: this is the insurer's own application infrastructure.

Notable

The prefix list is dominated by a legacy 128.35.0.0/16, further split into halves and quarters, plus a large 170.138.0.0/16 and a wide spread of 161.249 and 149.111 blocks. Splitting a /16 into /17s and /18s alongside the covering route is standard enterprise traffic engineering across multiple data centres and transit providers.

Interesting

No IPv6 is observed at all, which for a network of this size in the mid-2020s is a deliberate choice about where the effort goes, and a common one in regulated, change-averse industries.