AS9860 NHIS-AS-KR National Health Insurance Service

AS9860 (NHIS-AS-KR) is held by the National Health Insurance Service (국민건강보험공단, NHIS), South Korea's single public health insurer. Established in 2000 by merging the country's fragmented health insurance societies into one body, and operating under the Ministry of Health and Welfare, NHIS is the single-payer insurer for essentially the entire Korean population and is headquartered in Wonju, Gangwon State.

What it's used for

This is a public-agency enterprise network. RIS observes 11 IPv4 prefixes totalling 2,816 addresses, no IPv6, and only two BGP neighbours. Two upstreams settles the role question immediately: this AS exists so the agency can multi-home its own services with provider-independent addressing, not to carry anyone else's traffic. A wholesale or eyeball network of any description would show a different neighbour profile.

The address space is fragmented in a telling way. Three prefixes form a contiguous run (210.178.133.0/24 to 210.178.135.0/24), while the rest are single /24s scattered across 211.109.x, 1.255.x, 58.232.x, 211.214.x, 58.122.x, 58.227.x, 114.207.x and 116.123.x — many different Korean carrier ranges. That is what an organisation with a national footprint of regional branches accumulates: a block from whichever provider served each site, kept and announced from a central ASN. NHIS runs member-facing portals, employer reporting systems, a large claims and eligibility back end and dozens of regional offices, and a few thousand public addresses behind two upstreams is a plausible internet-facing edge for exactly that.

Notable

• NHIS is the insurer half of Korea's health system; claims review sits with a separate body, the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service, on its own infrastructure.
• The scattered provider-assigned /24s reflect a branch network built out over time rather than one central allocation.