we are talking about an address IP range that happens to be DNS registered..it could be as simple as the DoD has some extra bandwidth/infrastructure that they are leasing out to say Sprint?
No, DOD is not leasing out IP addresses; ISPs are basically "stealing" them from DOD. This shouldn't be happening, but for some reason cellular carriers are complaining that ARIN won't give them IPv4 addresses even though addresses are available and the carriers clearly have enough devices to qualify. Something has gone wrong here, but I have not been able to find out why.
.it could be as simple as the DoD has some extra bandwidth/infrastructure that they are leasing out to say Sprint?
Ok, I get that in principle... but that particular combination sounds awfully suspicious. The DoD just happens to have extra IP space, and they just happen to lease it to cell phone carriers? Hmmmmmmmmm....
I mean, yeah, it could all be totally innocuous, but I'm still suspicious that there might be something else going on. I'm not exactly a card carrying member of the tinfoil-hat brigade, but I trust our government about as far as I can throw it... :-)
Do a control-f for "DOD". These guys have so much IP4 space its not even funny. Being the government, they'll never give it up. So a total of 200 million IP4 addresses:
So, when the country that starts the internet is also the country with the largest, by far, military and has obscene military spending, well, this is what happens.
The best part is that the DoD is working hard to limit the outgoing bandwidth to just a certain subset of IP addresses in an attempt to limit their attack surface, so most of those IP addresses are never going to be externally accessible and may simple be used internally for internal only networks.
