Vodacom IP Ranges
Vodacom is South Africa's largest mobile operator, headquartered in Midrand and majority-owned by Vodafone Group. AS29975 is its AFRINIC-registered retail and mobile ASN, as-name VODACOM-ZA, held under the organisation handle ORG-VA67-AFRINIC and routed under VODACOM-MNT. It is not the only Vodacom number in that same organisation record: AS36994, named Vodacom-VB for Vodacom Business, and AS37311, a dormant registration announcing nothing today, sit alongside it. Outside South Africa the group runs separately numbered networks entirely, among them AS36908 in Tanzania, AS37223 in Mozambique, AS37453 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, AS37057 in Lesotho and AS29674 for Vodacom Business Ghana.
- Provider
- Vodacom
- Primary ASN
- AS29975
- Category
- ISP
- Headquarters
- Midrand, South Africa
- Announced IPv4 prefixes
- 127
- Registry
- AFRINIC
Known IP ranges
These prefixes are currently announced to the global routing table by AS29975 (Vodacom - Vodacom). Prefix sets change over time - use WHOIS Lookup for the authoritative record on any specific address.
41.12.0.0/16
41.8.0.0/16
105.249.64.0/18
41.2.0.0/18
41.9.128.0/18
41.5.128.0/18
105.248.192.0/18
41.29.128.0/18
41.7.0.0/18
41.9.64.0/18
What does a Vodacom IP mean in a privacy test?
Seeing a Vodacom address in a privacy test almost always means a South African mobile data session rather than a home broadband line. AS29975's largest blocks are registered with names like Vodacom_UMTS_Durban_Kwazulu_Natal_INTERNET_APN and Vodacom_UMTS_Cape_Town_Western_Cape_INTERNET_APN, the kind of pool a phone or mobile router draws from for one session and loses afterward. Reverse DNS usually confirms it, and it is often more specific than the netname: the older 196.207.32.0/20 GPRS block answers with names like vc-196-207-32-1.3g.vodacom.co.za, while the newer 41.0.0.0/11 and 105.240.0.0/12 UMTS space answers with a region code built into the name - 41.8.0.1 resolves to vc-kzn-41-8-0-1.umts.vodacom.co.za and 105.248.5.5 to vc-cpt-105-248-5-5.umts.vodacom.co.za. Both zones are served by Vodacom's own nameservers, dnsinfo1-mtp-auth.3g.vodacom.co.za and dnsinfo1-cte-auth.3g.vodacom.co.za. Coverage is not complete, and some addresses in the same blocks return no PTR at all, so a missing name here is routine on carrier space rather than a sign the lookup is broken.
The AFRINIC record that ties Vodacom's South African ASNs together
AS29975's aut-num object at AFRINIC gives its as-name as VODACOM-ZA and its organisation as ORG-VA67-AFRINIC, an entity registered simply as Vodacom at a Cape Town PO box in Roggebaai, some way from the Midrand campus that is the group's actual head office today. The same organisation handle also owns AS36994 (as-name Vodacom-VB, Vodacom Business) and AS37311 (as-name VODACOM, registered but announcing nothing), so three South African ASNs share one AFRINIC identity even though only two of them route traffic. Two maintainers control AS29975's own routes: VODACOM-MNT, and an oddly specific one called TF-196-46-160-0-196-46-175-255-MNT, a name left over from 196.46.160.0/20, the block RIPEstat's routing history shows this ASN first announcing, on 3 March 2004.
There is no geofeed on any of it - no block sampled carries a geofeed: line, and no allowlist is published for firewalls. The nearest thing to an official statement of what a block is for is the netname, and Vodacom's netnames are unusually descriptive: 41.8.0.0/16 and 41.12.0.0/16 carry Vodacom_UMTS_Durban_Kwazulu_Natal_INTERNET_APN, 105.248.0.0/16 carries Vodacom_UMTS_Cape_Town_Western_Cape_INTERNET_APN, 41.1.0.0/16 carries Vodacom_Wimax, and 196.11.146.0/23 still carries VODAC3, a legacy PI assignment predating the current AFRINIC-allocated ranges. Those specific blocks sit inside much broader allocations that name no city in their own netname at all - VODACOM-20071126 for 41.0.0.0/11, VODACOM-06062012 for the 105.240.0.0/12 supernet and VODACOM-UMTS for 41.192.0.0/16 - so the specific, informative netname only appears once AFRINIC's allocation has been broken down into the smaller blocks Vodacom actually assigns to a region. Reading the netname on the exact prefix in question, not the covering allocation, is what tells you far more than the ASN number alone does.
A mobile session, a Vodacom Business circuit, or a different country's Vodacom
bgp.tools classifies AS29975 as an eyeball network and currently ranks it #2 in South Africa by estimated eyeball population, which fits what the registry data shows: its space is overwhelmingly UMTS, GPRS and WiMAX pools built for consumer and small-business access rather than hosting. In RIPEstat's routing data the only AS-path neighbour currently recorded for AS29975 is Vodacom's own AS36994, the Vodacom Business ASN, which separately announces about 148 prefixes of its own. That single-upstream picture describes the present rather than the whole history: RIPEstat's neighbour history for AS29975 also records transit and peering ASNs such as AS5713 (Telkom SA), AS174, AS2914 and AS3257 at earlier dates. Today, though, AS36994 is both the more likely home for a fixed circuit with a listening service and, functionally, the path AS29975's own traffic reaches the rest of the internet through. AS37311, the third ASN under the same organisation record, announces nothing at present, so an address will not appear there even though it is formally a Vodacom registration.
What none of this proves is that every address under AS29975 is a live Vodacom customer's mobile handset. Static-looking registrations exist inside the space that have moved on: 196.6.129.0/24 is still registered with the netname Vodacom_Corp_Hosting_Internal, but its reverse-DNS zone today is delegated to nameservers at an unrelated domain, socialcode.biz, rather than to Vodacom's own servers - a reminder that a netname records who a block was allocated to, not necessarily who is running whatever answers on it now. And outside South Africa the Vodacom brand runs on entirely different, separately registered ASNs - Tanzania, Mozambique, the DRC, Lesotho and Ghana each have their own - so a Vodacom-branded address elsewhere on the continent will not originate from AS29975 at all.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
What ASN does Vodacom use?
Vodacom's South African retail and mobile network announces from AS29975, registered with AFRINIC as VODACOM-ZA and held under the organisation handle ORG-VA67-AFRINIC. That same organisation record also owns AS36994, the separate Vodacom Business ASN, and a third, currently dormant registration, AS37311.
Why does a Vodacom IP appear in my privacy test?
Seeing a Vodacom address in a privacy test almost always means a South African mobile data session rather than a home broadband line. AS29975's largest blocks are registered with names like Vodacom_UMTS_Durban_Kwazulu_Natal_INTERNET_APN and Vodacom_UMTS_Cape_Town_Western_Cape_INTERNET_APN, the kind of pool a phone or mobile router draws from for one session and loses afterward. Reverse DNS usually confirms it, and it is often more specific than the netname: the older 196.207.32.0/20 GPRS block answers with names like vc-196-207-32-1.3g.vodacom.co.za, while the newer 41.0.0.0/11 and 105.240.0.0/12 UMTS space answers with a region code built into the name - 41.8.0.1 resolves to vc-kzn-41-8-0-1.umts.vodacom.co.za and 105.248.5.5 to vc-cpt-105-248-5-5.umts.vodacom.co.za. Both zones are served by Vodacom's own nameservers, dnsinfo1-mtp-auth.3g.vodacom.co.za and dnsinfo1-cte-auth.3g.vodacom.co.za. Coverage is not complete, and some addresses in the same blocks return no PTR at all, so a missing name here is routine on carrier space rather than a sign the lookup is broken.
How large is Vodacom's network on AS29975?
RIPEstat's routing data currently shows AS29975 announcing 127 IPv4 prefixes covering roughly 1.75 million addresses, and no IPv6 space at all. Most of that is UMTS and GPRS mobile-data pools rather than fixed broadband, spread across regional blocks with names like Vodacom_UMTS_Cape_Town_Western_Cape_INTERNET_APN.
What doesn't an IP on AS29975 prove?
It does not prove the address is a residential line, that the person is in the city the record names, or even that Vodacom itself is running whatever answers on it. Vodacom's mobile pools are dynamic session addresses whose reverse DNS names a serving region rather than a subscriber, a block registered as internal Vodacom hosting can have its reverse DNS delegated to an unrelated third party today, and a fixed circuit with a real listening service is more likely to sit on the separate AS36994 than here.
How do I look up whether a specific IP address belongs to Vodacom?
Run it through WHOIS Lookup to see the registered inetnum, its netname and its origin ASN, then check that the origin reads AS29975, AS36994 or AS37311 and that the organisation is ORG-VA67-AFRINIC. IP Geolocation Lookup adds a location estimate, but for this network the reverse DNS name and the netname - which often name a specific South African region - are usually the more precise signals.