AS9709 KISVAN-AS-KR KIS Information Communication,Inc

AS9709 (KISVAN-AS-KR) is held by KIS Information & Communication, Inc., a South Korean payments company. KIS is one of the country's card VAN operators: the intermediary layer that carries authorisation and settlement traffic between merchant terminals and the card issuers. The handle matches its domain, kisvan.co.kr.

What it's used for

This is a single-purpose corporate network. RIS sees exactly 1 IPv4 prefix, 210.116.197.0/24, 256 addresses in total, no IPv6, and 3 observed neighbours. The ratio is the interesting part: three upstreams for one /24 is a deliberately over-provisioned edge, which is what a payment intermediary buys. The address count is irrelevant to a VAN, because the traffic that matters is transaction authorisation flowing over private links to card companies and out to merchant terminals, but availability is everything, since an outage means merchants cannot take card payments. So the network is tiny and multihomed rather than large and single-homed, the opposite of an access network's profile.

Notable

• KIS operates in a crowded segment. South Korea has more than two dozen licensed VAN companies, with KIS alongside names such as KICC, KCP, NICE and Smartro.
• Beyond classic terminal VAN service, the company offers payment-gateway services for online merchants, a smartphone-based payment app, and operates local-currency voucher schemes for Korean municipalities.
• The company name is easy to confuse with KICC (한국정보통신), a different Korean VAN operator with a similar English rendering. They are separate businesses.