AS11232 MIDCO-NET

MIDCO-NET is Midcontinent Communications, trading as Midco — the regional cable operator serving the northern Plains (the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Kansas). It is a consumer broadband network, and the routing evidence says so unambiguously.

What it's used for

Residential and small-business broadband access. RIS observes 79 IPv4 prefixes carrying ~783,616 addresses, 19 IPv6 prefixes, and 67 observed neighbours. Three-quarters of a million IPv4 addresses is subscriber-scale, and 67 neighbours is the right shape for a regional eyeball network: enough to multihome and peer at exchanges, nowhere near the hundreds-to-thousands a wholesale carrier accumulates.

Reverse DNS settles the rest. Nearly every sampled address answers as <a>-<b>-<c>-<d>-dynamic.midco.net or -static.midco.net — DHCP-assigned cable-modem pools with static assignments interleaved for business customers. The ARIN network handles reinforce it: the announced blocks are literally named NET-96-2-0-0-23-DHCP, NET-165-23-0-0-24-DHCP, NET-24-220-0-0-24-STATIC. The space is registered to the operator's own networks and wears the operator's own rDNS, so there is no leasing or third-party-registrant shape here.

Notable

The address inventory is an archaeology of cable-ISP growth: legacy 24.x cable space, 96.2.0.0/15, 184.83.0.0/16, 208.107.0.0/16 and several 165.x/140.186.0.0/16 blocks that predate Midco's use of them. IPv6 is properly deployed, with a /32 and several larger aggregates in production.

Interesting

Midco is one of the few sizeable independent US cable operators left; most peers of its era were absorbed into Charter or Comcast.