AS9355 NICT National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

AS9355 (NICT) is held by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan's national research institute for information and communications, headquartered in Koganei, Tokyo. NICT is a public research body, and it also builds and runs network testbeds — most notably JGN, the high-speed R&D network testbed it has operated since the late 1990s.

What it's used for

The evidence is that of a research institution's own network, not a provider. RIS observes 2 IPv4 prefixes — 133.243.0.0/16 and 133.140.0.0/16, 131,072 addresses between them — one IPv6 /48 (2001:df0:232::/48), and 14 BGP neighbours. Two clean, unsplit /16s is a classic legacy academic allocation: 133/8 is the historic Japanese research and university range, and institutions there hold whole /16s that they never had to fragment. The address count is large but the structure is flat, which is what an organisation using space internally looks like, as opposed to a provider slicing blocks out for customers. Fourteen neighbours is more than a plain end-site would carry and is consistent with a research body that peers with academic and testbed networks in addition to buying commercial transit. The reverse-DNS sample returned nothing usable, so this card makes no claim about how the zone is delegated or what naming is in use.

Notable

• NICT's remit spans ICT research broadly, from network testbeds to time and frequency standards and space-weather work.
• The 133/8 prefixes are legacy academic space, which is why a research institute holds two /16s.
• IPv6 is announced only as a single /48, which is small relative to the IPv4 holdings.