Been getting Odd IP addresses for quite sometime

[Dgc]

Hello,
I’ve been a mobility customer for a while.
I’ve noticed my iPhone obtains an external mobile public IP address for the past couple of years from a small pool:

207.228.78.0/24

The IP address most of the time lists me as in Calgary when I’m 3 hours north of Calgary.

Sometimes the Gateway IP is something like:

25.228.123.92.

Other times my phone gets a different Address from another pool:

198.166.206.0/24 which lists me out in Halifax


I use whatsmyipddress.com and Network Analyzer to view my IP addresses and Routing table.

Traceroutes always seem to exit the internal gateway through Ottawa or Toronto.

For example if I google something like a restaurant or Canadian tire, it will list stores 3 hours south of me. Even when i travel out of town to Sask or Vancouver the IP addresses are the same. Seems fixed somehow, they don’t change out of that specific IP Pool ever.

Anyone else experience this ?

[FuzzyLogic]

This is similar to a recent forum post:

Solved: Public IP Address - TELUS Neighbourhood

[Dgc]

Thanks, yes somewhat similar. My IP doesn’t change that much though. Which is why I’m curious.

For me this has been going on since about Aug 2020. Where my phone is in the same address pool 207.228.78.0/24.
Since it’s been in that pool for so long my guess is it’s based either on account or phone number where they have their own logical grouping probably by sim (imsi ) Or it was placed there. I get 1 of 254 of those addresses in the pool. I’ll be heading out of AB soon so I’ll see if being somewhere else in the country still results in my phone being in that pool. Just found it strange with the trace routes travelling across the country internally before leaving the gateway.
No VPNs enabled
iCloud relay disabled.

I guess I could ask, anyone else in Edmonton in the same pool 207.228.78.0 or the 198.166.64.0?


Also the gateway net range 25.0.0.0 previously used by UK MoD (this one however is also known that these old UK DoD (MoD) leased back the IPs they had due to internet running low on IPv4 addresses.

As for overall performance, mobile Internet runs fine.

[FuzzyLogic]

I'm in Edmonton and currently my phone cellular IP is in the 75.155.0.0/14 range. Whatismyip.com gives a postal code of T5J 0K7 which is less than 3Km from my actual location.

I believe that your IP stays pretty consistent unless you lose connection to the cellular network. You could try cycling airplane mode to see if you can get a new IP address.

[Dgc]

Thanks for the reply.
No matter how much cycling I’ve done:
- Hard reboot of iPhone (volume up/down quickly then hold side button till apple logo appears)
- reset network settings
- toggle mobile data on/off
- toggle airplane mode on/off
- wipe/clean install of iOS (using iTunes/don’t restore backup)

The result on most occasions is that 207.228 pool showing me in SE Calgary.

[Nighthawk]

I'm in Edmonton and have a 198.166.x IP address on my iPhone. I've had no issues with various sites or apps incorrectly guessing my location.

[Dgc]

Thanks, sometimes I do get this pool. 198.166.x
Which based on yours also being that I’ll guess it’s normal.

[Dgc]

Hello,

The odd IP address that firmly lists me as 3 hours south of Edmonton was reassigned to me yesterday:

207.228.78.14 was what I acquired.

I then ran a trace route to Edmonton.ca (good test route), and the hops were as follows:

96.1.138.29
02
10.187.15.240
O 3
10.187.165.8
O 4
10.187.165.14
05
10.187.165.65
~6
10.187.15.163
07
10.187.18.1
08
10.187.18.2
10.187.253.132

Unfortunately I stopped the trace before it reached its destination. Next time it happens I’ll be sure to get the full output.

I then rebooted my phone to acquired the 198.166.x.x address and trace routes were different:

100.123.66.55
02
100.123.66.138
O 3
100.123.66.141
100.123.65.162
О 4
05
O 6
154.11.12.219
07
74.125.50.110
08
108.170.245.113
O 9
142.251.55.199
010 35.190.75.248

Seems 100.123.x.x made a bit more sense then the 10.187.x.x addresses in the 207.228 trace route output.

I’ve brought this up with telus before and they believe it’s normal my phone appears to be In Calgary. They said if I went as far as Halifax for example it should change and not reflect Calgary.
(This is without using location services and getting an exact gps location of course, we’re talking strictly IP addresses, and where the internet thinks I am, which is what my browsers report, and other websites).

[Dgc]

Replying to myself once more here. I was assigned the 207.228.x.x address again while in my building, here is the full trace route the Edmonton.ca:

01, 02, 03, etc represents a hop.

01
75.153.170.244
02
10.187.15.243
O 3
10.187.165.8
10.187.165.17
05
10.187.165.65
06
10.187.15.163
7
10.187.18.1
08
10.187.18.2
0 9
10.187.253.132
010
011
154.11.12.219
012
74.125.50.110
013
108.170.245.113
014
142.251.50.245
35.190.75.248
O 15
248.75.190.35.bc.googleusercontent.com


Here’s the route when getting what I think is a normal IP 192.166.185.x:

100.123.66.55
02
100.123.66.138
O 3
100.123.66.141
100.123.65.162
05
0 6
154.11.12.217
7
74.125.50.110
08
108.170.245.113
0 9
142.251.241.137
010
35.190.75.248




As you can see from both traces it eventually gets to 154.11.12.x which is Telus’s most likely the gateway out to the internet after multiple hops across the country. (Seems to exit internal nat all the way out in Ottawa).

My question at this point is, anyone else see this behaviour, and is it possible someone in my building is running a tool that would capture everything (cell site simulator) for nefarious purposes. Or, given I’ve seen this outside my building as well, would Telus be assigning this IP, and could my phone be in some strange pool ?
How does Telus choose to assign IP addresses, I heard it’s based on location.
I either get 1 of 2 IP ranges I’ve listed In this post.

What’s strange is last year my phone seemed to have some kind of host name and I was running on a network called “interbaun communications”, when I’m a Telus Mobility subscriber.
Almost seems like they contract out their wireless communications handling, e.g the towers, etc or anything to do with it. They do contract out everything else like home services installations and such, could they also contract out the cell towers and let someone else handle it. If so then those contractors could in theory do whatever they wanted as long as the phones are connected and functioning, just seems a bit odd and I’ve finally posted publicly here on the forum about it.

[Dgc]

After taking this one step further and using tethered internet from my laptop rather then trying to understand things from my phone itself.

Sure enough the 207.228.78.x  address was acquired as the public IP of the laptop.

Out of curiosity, after additional research to understand these 10.187.x.x hops it appears to be a FreeBSD configuration with Splunk integration. 

So, it's definitely not a cell site simulator causing this and is done at the Telus carrier level,  as I was far away from my building acquiring this IP.

It appears and correct me if I’m wrong this would be Telus's way of monitoring their mobile traffic/user activity using FreeBSD with Splunk Integration, all data that passes through this integration is indexed, and searchable. (Completely normal)

Telus does however offer deals on Norton VPN which in Splunk would show the user connecting to VPN/duration etc, which is fine and normal. 

Interesting stuff and makes sense now, all came up out of curiosity in understanding why I'm listed in Calgary when 207 is my public IP, and why so many different hops with TraceRoute when acquiring this 207.address, this specific IP pool is in Calgary. 

I'll assume this is all normal and nothing out of the ordinary is going on here and everyone else in Alberta should experience this type of behavior at some point where their searches list them in Calgary or whatsmyip lists them in Calgary, which makes it annoying when trying to look up a local business and one example would be you’re on a Canadian tire website and the stock shows the item available but it’s out of stock. If you’re not paying attention to your location picked up by Canadian tire you may travel to the store to find out the item is out of stock 🙂 Probably happens In other provinces as well, and most likely other carriers using this technology. 

Would be great to get a Telus response from someone on the networking side or is this something they will be fixing (mobile location issues) as someone already posted, It happens.   Not urgent and I won’t be updating this thread anymore.. thanks to those who initially chimed in.