Kentucky · network infrastructure

Capacity in Kentucky sits in small pieces rather than one center. Quad State Internet PAH1 Colocation in Paducah lists nine networks, more than any single building in the state. Louisville has four records, Heyburn Building with four networks, Flexential Louisville/Downtown with two, and Flexential Louisville/East and BluegrassNet Louisville with none listed. Energynet Datacenter in Hopkinsville holds four, CyrusOne Florence and East Kentucky Network Data Center in Ivel two each. PaducahIX, with ten participants, is where traffic meets locally; networks in the other seven cities peer elsewhere.

A Kentucky IP address reports what its operator registered, which is not the same as where the device sits. Address blocks geolocate from the record the operator publishes, and that record can carry a corporate address in another state. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon each run mobile subscribers through regional gateways on a small set of ASNs, five for AT&T, five for T-Mobile and seven for Verizon. A handset in Lexington can resolve to a city on the other side of the state or outside it.

The origin ASN on a prefix answers more than a city name does. A block announced by one of those carrier ASNs came from mobile infrastructure, while a block tied to one of the 11 Kentucky facilities points at fixed hosting in Paducah, Louisville or one of the smaller cities. Reading the netname on the exact prefix shows what the operator declared, which a city-level geolocation guess does not.