Spectrum proxies — AS20115 residential cable exits

What Spectrum is

Spectrum is the consumer brand of Charter Communications, Inc. — the result of the 2016 merger that combined Charter, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks into a single operator. The combined entity runs two significant ASNs:

• AS20115: Charter's original ASN, now the primary Spectrum announcement.
• AS11427: Legacy Time Warner Cable's ASN, still in use for significant portions of the combined footprint (NYC metro, much of the Carolinas, upstate New York, LA basin).

Both announce Spectrum-branded residential IPs. Commercial GeoIP databases identify them as related but distinct. For Proxaro purposes we treat them as a unified Spectrum pool; the ASN tag on the exit is whichever one announces the specific prefix we're using.

Subscriber scale

Charter / Spectrum reported approximately 30M residential internet subscribers at the end of 2024 — second-largest US cable ISP after Comcast, and first by coverage area (Spectrum serves 27 states vs. Comcast's more concentrated footprint). That broader coverage plus the geographic complementarity with Comcast is why the two companies together cover most of the US cable-ISP market without overlapping much.

The Spectrum footprint

Spectrum's coverage map is the direct union of the pre-merger footprints:

• Legacy Charter footprint: Most of the South (Texas outside AT&T's fiber cores, most of Georgia outside Atlanta, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina), the Upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Minnesota rural), Southern California (outside Bay Area), and the Pacific Northwest rural.
• Legacy Time Warner Cable footprint: New York City metro, Los Angeles / Orange County metro, the Carolinas (Charlotte and the Triangle), Ohio metros outside Cincinnati, most of Texas metros outside Dallas's AT&T-Fiber core.
• Legacy Bright House footprint: Central Florida (Tampa, Orlando), Birmingham, Indianapolis, parts of Michigan.

Key states:

• Texas: Second-largest Spectrum footprint after CA; dominant in Houston, Austin, San Antonio metros (while AT&T leads in DFW).
• Florida: Central and West FL Spectrum territory via the Bright House acquisition.
• California: LA and SoCal (legacy TWC) plus Sacramento / Central Valley (legacy Charter).
• North Carolina: Charlotte, the Triangle, and most of the Piedmont are Spectrum (legacy TWC).
• New York: NYC and upstate are Spectrum (legacy TWC); Comcast does not serve NY.

Spectrum fingerprinting

Spectrum is treated by most integrity stacks as a default-trust US cable ISP, same class as Comcast. A few Spectrum-specific wrinkles:

• The AS20115 and AS11427 split means two distinct ASN signals on the same consumer brand. Some integrity stacks weight them slightly differently — AS11427 (legacy TWC) sometimes carries a marginally different trust score than AS20115 in platforms whose training data distinguished them.
• Spectrum Mobile (the MVNO) runs on Verizon's network under separate Verizon-allocated prefixes. Spectrum Mobile traffic does not announce from AS20115 or AS11427. Our Spectrum pool excludes Spectrum Mobile.
• Spectrum's CPE stack is more homogeneous than Comcast's (fewer white-label modems in rotation), which subtly reduces the diversity of the device-fingerprint signal from Spectrum residential captures.

When Spectrum is the right pick

• Texas residential traffic outside AT&T Fiber's urban cores
• California residential outside Bay Area (where Comcast is the baseline)
• Carolinas residential — Spectrum is effectively the only cable ISP for much of NC's metros
• NYC metro residential traffic when you want a TWC-legacy fingerprint rather than Verizon Fios
• Florida Central / West Coast (Tampa, Orlando) residential

Pricing and pool access

Spectrum ASN pinning (AS20115 + AS11427) is available on Carrier and above. Recommended starting state pools: Texas, Florida, California, North Carolina, New York.

References

• Charter 2024 Annual Report: residential internet subscriber count
• peeringdb.com — AS20115 Charter, AS11427 legacy TWC
• Leichtman Research Group: 2024 US broadband subscriber tracking
• bgp.tools AS20115 + AS11427 — prefix inventory