AS11191 CALNET

CALNET is Cal.net, Inc., a Northern and Central California broadband provider. It is a fixed-wireless and fibre ISP serving rural and underserved communities in the Sierra foothills and the Central Valley, and it has grown by absorbing other small local providers.

What it's used for

Consumer and small-business internet access. RIS observes 78 IPv4 prefixes and about 27,648 addresses, no IPv6, and 11 BGP neighbours — a modest peering estate consistent with an eyeball network buying transit in several places, not a wholesale carrier.

The reverse DNS is the giveaway and it is unusually informative, because it names the brands Cal.net has acquired rather than just Cal.net: host-216-57-64-5-cal.net and host-208-91-4-5.cust.cal.net, alongside ip-69-80-248-5.wireless.static.fire2wire.com, son-72-4-176-5.dsl.mlode.com (Mother Lode Internet) and son-216-86-184-5.static.knxs.net. Fixed-wireless subscriber pools, DSL pools, and static customer assignments — all end-user access, under several legacy ISP names.

Notable

The prefix registrants look scattered at first glance and are worth reading carefully. Most blocks are registered to Cal.net's own ARIN handles (CAL-NET-INC-0 through -11), but some are not: 38.133.104.0/21 is Cogent space, 67.118.192.0/21 is legacy SBC/AT&T space, and 52.129.41.0/24 is registered to WBL-25 — Winters Broadband, one of the small ISPs pulled into the Cal.net group.

That combination — provider-assigned blocks from upstreams plus blocks still registered to acquired companies — is what a genuinely acquisitive regional ISP looks like. It is superficially similar to the address-broker pattern, but the discriminator holds: the rDNS is first-party across every brand, and every named registrant is a real, findable California ISP rather than a shell.