Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) lets an internet provider share public IPv4 addresses among multiple customers. A customer’s router may perform one layer of network address translation, while the provider performs another between its network and the public internet. As a result, many subscribers can appear to use the same public IP address.
Why It Matters for Crawling and Rate Limits
IP-based systems may see a shared address for traffic from unrelated users. A rate limit, block, or reputation score attached only to that address can therefore affect more than one subscriber. Conversely, an address change does not necessarily mean the underlying user or device changed.
The range 100.64.0.0/10 is reserved as shared address space for this purpose; it is not the same as the private IPv4 ranges in RFC 1918. Seeing an address in that range on the provider side can be a clue, but it does not reveal every detail of a network path.
CGNAT is a network translation arrangement, not a proxy service. It can complicate inbound connections and attribution, but it does not itself provide a different country or a dedicated public IP. When diagnosing a crawler, compare application logs with network information instead of treating one IP as a user identity.
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