AS9270 APAN-KR-AS National Infomation Society Agency

AS9270 (APAN-KR-AS) is held by Korea's National Information Society Agency (NIA), the statutory ICT agency that sits under the Ministry of Science and ICT. The AS carries NIA's research-and-education networking, historically the Korean side of APAN (the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network) and the KOREN advanced research testbed network.

What it's used for

This is a national research network, and the routing evidence matches that role rather than any commercial one. It announces 22 IPv4 prefixes totalling roughly 13,568 addresses plus a single IPv6 /32 (2407:c000::/32). The address count is tiny by carrier standards, but the ~21 observed BGP neighbours is high relative to that footprint. That combination — very little address space, many peers — is the fingerprint of an R&E network whose purpose is interconnection: peering with other national research networks, with international R&E exchanges and with regional IXPs so that Korean universities and institutes can reach their counterparts abroad on dedicated paths. An eyeball ISP with 13k addresses would peer with almost nobody; a network that exists to carry science traffic between countries peers with everyone in that community.

Notable

• The prefixes are a mixture of legacy Korean space (203.255.248.0/21, 210.114.88.0/21, 61.252.56.0/22) and newer APNIC assignments (45.248.72.0/22, 103.22.220.0/22), which is typical of a long-lived R&E operator that has added space in stages.
• NIA is a government agency rather than a carrier, so the AS should be read as public-sector research infrastructure, not a service provider.
• APAN itself is a consortium of Asia-Pacific research networks; this AS is the Korean member's routing identity within it, not the consortium's own network.