AS7660 APAN-JP Asia Pacific Advanced Network - Japan

APAN-JP is the Japanese arm of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network, the regional consortium of research and education networks. APAN-JP is the largest national contingent in APAN, and AS7660 is its network, registered from a KDDI building in Otemachi, Tokyo.

What it's used for

• Research and education networking. The AS is small and deliberately so: two IPv4 /23s out of JPNIC space for about 1,000 addresses, alongside a much larger IPv6 inventory in 2001:200:900::/40 and 2001:200:e000::/35.
• Its upstreams are exactly the ones you would expect of an R&E network and nothing else: KDDI, SINET (Japan's National Institute of Informatics science network) and the WIDE Project.
• Reverse DNS is research infrastructure. Hosts resolve under jp.apan.net, including PlanetLab measurement nodes.

Notable

• This is research address space. No subscribers, no commercial hosting, no enterprise. Traffic from AS7660 is far more likely to be a measurement node, an experimental service or an inter-NREN link than an ordinary user.
• The IPv6 footprint dwarfs the IPv4 one, which is characteristic of the Japanese research community: APAN and WIDE were doing production IPv6 long before commercial networks touched it.

Interesting

• APAN is a consortium rather than a carrier, so this AS exists mainly to give the Japanese chapter its own presence for interconnection and experimentation. The address space is the point of contact, not the product.