AS10158 KAKAO-10158-AS-KR Kakao Corp

KAKAO-10158-AS-KR is one of the network numbers of Kakao Corp, the South Korean

internet company behind KakaoTalk messaging, the Daum portal, Kakao Maps and

Kakao Pay.

What it's used for

• Serving Kakao's own consumer platforms from its Korean data centres: portal and search front-ends, messaging infrastructure and the authoritative DNS for its properties.

Notable

This is a content/hosting network, not an access provider, and the two halves

of the pack say it together. The sampled reverse DNS returns ns1.daum.net and

ns2.daum.net on 113.61.106.5 / 113.61.107.5 — Kakao merged with Daum

Communications in 2014, so the surviving daum.net naming inside Kakao-announced

space is first-party, not a hosted third party. Nothing in the sample looks like

subscriber space: no pool, dhcp or dsl naming, just named service hosts.

The decisive figure is 119 observed BGP neighbours against only 5,888

announced IPv4 addresses in 23 prefixes. That ratio is the signature of a content

network: it peers aggressively and settlement-free at Korean and regional

exchanges to put its own traffic close to eyeballs, while needing very little

address space to do it. A carrier with 119 neighbours would be routing far more

than a /19's worth of space; an enterprise with 5,888 addresses would have three

or four peers.

Interesting

• The AS also announces six IPv6 prefixes including 2404:4600::/32, so Kakao's IPv6 footprint is provisioned well ahead of the IPv4 one.
• Kakao runs several distinct ASNs; this one is a service-facing slice rather than the whole company.