AS7665 OKIX Okayama Prefectural Government

OKIX belongs to the Okayama Prefectural Government, the regional authority for Okayama Prefecture in western Japan. It routes the prefecture's own wide-area network rather than any commercial service.

What it's used for

• Two prefixes, 210.236.96.0/20 and 122.152.16.0/20 — about 8,200 addresses — plus an IPv6 /32 at 2001:d50::/32. JPNIC registers the space directly to the prefectural government under the OKIX netname.
• Reverse DNS resolves into okix.ad.jp, with router-style names such as gr1b-1.okix.ad.jp. The .ad.jp domain class is reserved in Japan for network operators and JPNIC members, which is consistent with a prefecture running its own backbone.
• The network connects prefectural offices, municipalities, schools and public institutions across Okayama and provides their route to the wider internet.

Notable

• A government network. The address space should be attributed to a public authority, not to an ISP or a hosting provider, even though the AS holds carrier-scale address blocks and buys transit from multiple Japanese providers.
• Despite the -IX in the handle, this is not an internet exchange in the peering-fabric sense; it is a prefecture-operated wide-area network. Treat the handle as a name, not a description.

Interesting

• Japan's prefectures built their own regional information backbones from the late 1990s onward. Holding an AS number this low, plus an IPv6 /32, is a marker of how early Okayama got into that programme.