AS9221 HSBC-HK-AS HSBC HongKong

AS9221 (HSBC-HK-AS) is held by The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, the Hong Kong arm of the HSBC banking group. It is a corporate network: HSBC's own Internet-facing address space in Hong Kong, not a service sold to anyone else.

What it's used for

The routing evidence is textbook enterprise. RIS sees 33 IPv4 prefixes carrying 14,336 addresses, plus 6 IPv6 prefixes, and only 9 BGP neighbours. That ratio is the giveaway: a wholesale carrier of this size would peer with hundreds of networks, and an eyeball ISP with this much space would show many more upstreams and exchange sessions. Nine neighbours on a modest, tightly clustered address footprint is what a large multinational buys when it wants multihomed, provider-independent connectivity for its own premises and its own public services.

The space itself is concentrated in three ranges — a 161.113.192.0/19 and contiguous blocks in 203.112.80.0/21 and 27.110.72.0/21 — and it is heavily deaggregated, with most of the announcement list made up of /23s carved out of those parents. Splitting a /19 into /23s is standard practice for a bank steering traffic between data centres and for keeping specific service blocks pinned to specific upstreams.

Notable

• The 2406:0dc0:: IPv6 prefixes are APNIC-region assignments, consistent with a Hong Kong-registered holder rather than an inherited European or American allocation.
• HSBC runs separate autonomous systems in other regions; this one is the Hong Kong entity's network and should not be read as covering the whole group.