AS9516 SAKURALINK-AS-AP SAKURA LINK LIMITED

AS9516 (SAKURALINK-AS-AP) is held by Sakura Link Limited, a Hong Kong network and hosting company. Despite the low, legacy-range AS number, APNIC records the current registration as recent — the number appears to have been recycled and re-issued rather than held continuously since the 1990s.

What it's used for

This is an IPv6-only AS in the routing table. RIS sees zero IPv4 prefixes and three IPv6 /48s, all adjacent and drawn from the same 2401:f460::/32 block: 2401:f460:2100::/48, 2401:f460:2200::/48 and 2401:f460:2300::/48. Against that tiny inventory it shows 8 observed neighbours — a ratio that tells you more than the address count does. A network with essentially no addresses of its own but a spread of BGP adjacencies is not serving end users out of this AS; it is doing interconnection. Sakura Link operates hosting infrastructure in Hong Kong and runs an exchange point there, and this AS reads as a piece of that interconnection and v6 hosting estate rather than as the company's main customer-facing network.

Notable

• Sakura Link's principal, IPv4-carrying registration is a separate, much higher-numbered AS; AS9516 is the v6 sibling and carries none of the company's IPv4 space.
• Zero IPv4 prefixes originated is genuinely unusual in the legacy AS range — most networks this old are IPv4-first with v6 bolted on later. Here the number is old and the deployment is new.
• Upstreams and peers are Hong Kong hosting and transit carriers, consistent with a colocation/hosting footprint rather than an eyeball base.