AS9425 FITI-AS-BKB2 Future Internet Technology Infrastructure FITI

AS9425 (FITI-AS-BKB2) is held by Future Internet Technology Infrastructure (FITI), the Chinese national next-generation internet research facility built around CERNET and led by Tsinghua University. FITI is a state science-and-technology infrastructure project: an IPv6-based experimental backbone whose core nodes sit in universities across China.

What it's used for

This is a research backbone, and the routing evidence says so unusually clearly. In the RIS view the AS originates no IPv4 prefixes at all — zero routes, zero IPv4 addresses — and only 2 IPv6 prefixes, 2401:34a0::/32 and 2401:34a1::/32. An operational commercial network of any kind would carry IPv4; a network that has deliberately never had any is making a statement, and FITI's stated design is native IPv6 from the ground up. Against that near-empty prefix list the AS is observed with around 41 BGP neighbours, far more peers than routes. That combination — a wide peering fabric carrying a couple of large IPv6 blocks — is what an experimental backbone interconnecting research institutions looks like: the value is in the paths and the testbed, not in the address inventory. The BKB2 in the handle reads as a backbone element of the facility.

Notable

• The AS announces IPv6 only. Two /32s is an enormous amount of IPv6 address space and effectively unlimited for a testbed.
• FITI is associated with CERNET and Tsinghua University and has been publicly described as a high-speed next-generation (IPv6) backbone linking core nodes at universities across China.
• More neighbours (41) than announced prefixes (2) is the inverse of a normal network and is characteristic of research/interconnection infrastructure.