AS11426 TWC-11426-CAROLINAS

TWC-11426-CAROLINAS is one of the regional cable-broadband ASes Charter Communications inherited from Time Warner Cable. It carries residential Spectrum subscribers, principally in the Carolinas, and it is one of the larger eyeball networks in this AS range.

What it's used for

RIS shows 210 announced IPv4 prefixes covering roughly 4.7 million addresses, plus 9 IPv6 prefixes. The IPv4 inventory is built from big aggregates — several /14s and /15s, such as 172.72.0.0/14, 71.68.0.0/14 and 174.108.0.0/14 — which is the signature of a mass-market access network handing out address pools to subscriber CPE, not of a hosting estate carving out per-customer /24s.

Reverse DNS settles it. Sampled addresses across those aggregates resolve to syn-172-072-000-005.res.spectrum.com and siblings: the res. label is Spectrum's residential-subscriber zone, and the pattern repeats consistently across unrelated blocks. The prefix registrants agree, with the large blocks registered directly to Charter Communications Inc under the RRMA handle. Only 81 observed neighbours against nearly five million addresses is exactly the ratio expected of an eyeball network: it buys upstream and peers, but it is not selling transit at scale.

Notable

The consistent .res.spectrum.com naming makes this a high-confidence residential classification. It is the access network itself, so geolocation within the Carolinas footprint is meaningful at the block level rather than for the AS as a whole.

Interesting

Two stray /24s seen in the RIS window, 37.153.154.0/24 (RIPE) and 181.214.13.0/24 (LACNIC), are registered not to Charter but to an IP-leasing marketplace maintainer. Against 200-plus self-registered Charter aggregates they are a footnote, not a pattern, and they do not change what this AS is.