What Is My ISP

Why You Are Here

Three quite different reasons bring people to this page.

You need to confirm the provider for something practical. Support requests, network diagnostics, or checking that a VPN is routing your traffic through the provider you expect rather than leaking to your real connection.

A service is treating you differently and you want to know why. Streaming platforms, banks, and ticketing sites all make decisions based on which network you are connecting from. Knowing your provider and its ASN is the first step in understanding a block or a restriction.

You are diagnosing someone else's connection. IT support and troubleshooting frequently start with establishing what network a person is actually on, particularly when a home worker's connection is behaving oddly.

What This Tool Does

This tool identifies the network your connection belongs to, along with its Autonomous System Number and network details, using your public IP address and the routing records that state which operator owns that address.

Nothing needs to be entered. The detection happens automatically when the page loads.

Why the Provider Shown May Not Be the One You Pay

This is the most common source of confusion on this page, and it has several distinct causes.

Internet is frequently resold

The company that bills you may buy wholesale capacity from a larger network operator. Your connection belongs to that operator's address space, so their name appears rather than your provider's. This is routine in both fixed broadband and mobile.

Mobile virtual network operators work the same way

A smaller mobile brand typically runs entirely on a larger carrier's infrastructure. The carrier's name is what shows.

Corporate groups use one name across many brands

A provider you know by its consumer brand may register its networks under a parent company or holding company name.

Business connections show the account holder

On a corporate or campus network, the detected organisation is usually the employer or institution rather than any consumer ISP.

A VPN or proxy replaces the answer entirely

You will see the VPN provider or the data centre hosting their servers, which is the intended behaviour.

None of these mean anything is wrong

They reflect who owns the network your traffic actually travels over, which is a different question from who sends you a bill.

What an ASN Is and Why It Matters

An Autonomous System Number is a globally unique identifier for a network that manages its own routing. Every internet provider, cloud platform, content delivery network, and large organisation with independent routing has at least one. It is written with an AS prefix, for example AS15169.

Why the ASN is more useful than the name

Provider names are ambiguous. Several unrelated companies share trading names across different countries, and brands change through mergers. The ASN does not. When you report abuse, ask a service why you were blocked, or configure a firewall rule, the ASN identifies the network without ambiguity.

Home connections do not have their own ASN

Yours belongs to your provider, and every one of their customers appears under it. That is expected rather than a sign of anything shared or unusual.

Autonomous Systems announce their routes using BGP

The Border Gateway Protocol is how networks tell each other which addresses they are responsible for. It is the mechanism that makes the internet's routing work, and the ASN is each network's identity within it.

ASN Number Ranges

Who Assigns ASNs

Allocation is regional. Knowing which registry covers a network tells you where to direct an abuse report or a records correction.

IANA holds overall authority and allocates blocks to these five registries, which then assign individual ASNs to operators in their region.

The registry region is not a location

A network registered with RIPE NCC may operate infrastructure across several continents. Registration tells you where the operator's records are held, not where any particular server sits.

What Your ISP Can and Cannot See

A practical answer, since this is the question underneath much of the traffic to pages like this.

HTTPS changed this substantially

With encrypted connections, your provider can see that you connected to a domain but not which pages you viewed or what you submitted. Almost all significant traffic is now encrypted.

DNS is the remaining gap

Unless you use encrypted DNS, your provider can see every domain you look up even when the connection itself is encrypted. DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS close this, and most modern browsers and operating systems support them.

Retention varies by jurisdiction

What providers keep and for how long is a legal question rather than a technical one. Some countries mandate retention periods for connection records; others do not. It depends entirely on where you are.

Connection Type

Network ownership records also indicate what kind of connection an address belongs to, which explains why some services treat you differently.

This is why VPN traffic gets challenged

Streaming services, banks, and ticketing platforms treat data centre addresses with suspicion because ordinary consumers do not browse from server infrastructure. It is not the VPN itself being detected so much as the network category it belongs to.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Quick Reference