AS9975 KBISE-AS-KR Gyeongsangbuk-do Education Research Institute

AS9975 (KBISE-AS-KR) is held by the Gyeongsangbuk-do Education Research Institute (경상북도교육연구원), the research and teacher-development arm of the Gyeongsangbuk-do Office of Education, the provincial education authority for North Gyeongsang Province in South Korea. It is based in Andong. The AS carries the institute's own connectivity, not a service offered to anyone else.

What it's used for

This is about as small as a routed network gets. RIS sees a single announced IPv4 prefix, 203.255.232.0/23, totalling 512 addresses, no IPv6 at all, and exactly one observed BGP neighbour. One neighbour means one upstream: there is no redundancy in the routing and no peering. A /23 is enough to publish the institute's public services (web, mail, DNS, whatever teacher-training or e-learning systems it fronts) with everything else behind NAT.

The interesting question with an AS this small is why it exists at all, since a single-homed /23 does not need BGP. The usual answer for Korean public-sector networks of this vintage is that the address block and AS number were assigned together during the era when institutions took their own allocations directly, and the arrangement was simply never unwound.

Notable

• Read this as a government/education network rather than a research network in the NREN sense: it belongs to a provincial education office, not to a university.
• The province's schools are served by the education office's own networks; this AS is the institute's slice, not a province-wide school backbone.