AS10173 KSNET-AS KSNET.Inc

KSNET-AS belongs to KSNET, Inc., the South Korean payment processor founded in

1999. It runs a card VAN (value-added network) — the layer that carries card

authorisations between merchants' terminals and every card issuer in Korea — plus

a payment gateway for e-commerce, cash-receipt and point-card services.

What it's used for

• Payment transaction processing: the acquiring-side endpoints that merchant terminals, PG customers and issuer links connect to.

Notable

This is a business network in the enterprise sense: KSNET is a financial

service company that operates a network to deliver its product, not a

connectivity provider. The word NET in the name refers to a *value-added

network* in the payments sense, and the routing table shows exactly that — it is

not an ISP.

The pack records two announced IPv4 prefixes, 210.181.28.0/24 and

210.181.29.0/24 — adjacent halves of a /23, 512 addresses in total — no IPv6,

and three observed BGP neighbours. Three upstreams against half a thousand

addresses is a heavily multi-homed end site: the address footprint is tiny but

the availability requirement is severe, because a card VAN that drops off the

network stops checkout lines across the country. Splitting the /23 into two /24s

lets KSNET steer each half independently across those three paths.

Nothing suggests a provider role. There is no customer address space, no peering

estate, and no subscriber-shaped allocation — just a small, hard-to-kill block of

transaction endpoints.

Interesting

• KSNET processed over a billion transactions a year by the end of the 2000s on an address footprint smaller than a single university department's.