1

I have a Samsung Galaxy S21 FE, and I can't for the life of me imagine how I ended up with a non-routable IANA Reserved IP address on my mobile phone (the address is showing as 192.0.0.2). The phone has been been acting weird for months. The slow internet speeds and strange behavior lead me to do some poking around today, and I saw that my IP address was 192.0.0.2

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that I'm connected to someone's rogue base station. I called my cell carrier, and they confirmed that the cell tower I'm connected to is located at the address where I live. I assure you that there is no cell tower here. I also always have 5 bars of cell signal, yet downloads and accessing most (uncached) websites is extremely slow. I also noticed that the phone's status information shows "unavailable" for the WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses.

Is there a way to recover my device and circumvent the rogue cell tower, or is it time to move and buy a new phone?

3
  • If they traced the cell tower, then it is theirs. Were they surprised by the location of the tower? Why would buying a new device help? How would "recovering" the device help? What does a cell tower have to do with wifi and Bluetooth? Your cell reception is not "off the charts" it's exactly 5 bars. Signal strength does not correlate to speed. This question and it's conclusions are all over the place.
    – schroeder
    Commented Jul 31 at 0:48
  • google.com/search?q=locate+cell+tower+i%27m+connected+to If it is rogue, you can physically locate it.
    – schroeder
    Commented Jul 31 at 0:50
  • Try hopping on a bus and traveling a distance away from your current location, where you would connect to a different tower. Then check your signal strength, speeds, etc. Commented Jul 31 at 14:22

1 Answer 1

4

I assure you that there is no cell tower here.

Remember, not all cell sites are physical towers, many are hidden on/in existing buildings.

I know you are desperate to attribute your problems to malice, but I think it's more likely they are down to incompetence. It sounds to me like your cell provider providing a "microcell" to fill in a coverage blackspot, but has failed to provide sufficient back-haul connectivity to said microcell.

the address is showing as 192.0.0.2

Most cellular providers never assigned public IP addresses to their customers, preferring to use private addresses and ISP-level NAT. However, as both the total number of devices, and the proportion of devices with active packet data services have grown, the larger networks have started to find shortage of private IPv4 addresses to be a problem.

Some of them resorted to using IP addresses from "Squat space", either space allocated to but not used by large organisations or space not yet allocated by the IANA, but this has caused problems as the IPv4 address crunch has caused that previously unallocated space to come into use on the internet and users found themselves unable to access services hosted on thos addresses.

As an result, a number of cellular networks started to investigate moving away from private IPv4, to IPv6 with NAT64. However, this posed problematic with many apps, that either did not support IPv6 or tried to connect to IPv4 address literals rather than hostnames.

To solve this problem a solution known as 464xlat was designed and implemented in android*. The device would create a virtual IPv4 interface, packets sent to that interface would be translated to IPv6 and sent to the NAT64, which would translate them back to IPv4 and put them on the internet. Return packets would undergo a similar double translation.

Addressing is needed for the virtual network that connects the translator to the main network stack of the device. These addresses do not need to be globally unique since it won't be seen outside the device, but it does need to avoid conflicts with any public or private networks to which the device may be connected.

An older transition solution, DS-lite was allocated the block 192.0.0.0/29 for this purpose. After 464xlat was devised, it was decided that rather than allocating a separate block for each transition solution, the use of 192.0.0.0/29 would be generalised to all similar transition solutions.

* Apple took a different approach to this problem, using app-store policies to bully application developers into making sure their applications worked behind NAT64.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .