Summary

  • APNIC introduced a charge for ASNs beyond an account's first two on 1 January 2025. The Executive Council minutes say the schedule omitted experimental ASNs; Sumon Ahmed Sabir moved Resolution 2025-07 to correct it, and the Council passed it unanimously.
  • The current schedule excludes qualifying experimental ASNs from the AUD 500 allocation fee and AUD 100 annual fee. Researchers still pass APNIC's published experiment and account-holder rules.

The bill reached the test bench

An Autonomous System Number identifies a network's routing domain. APNIC's price guide gives each account its first two ASNs without an ASN charge. Beyond that threshold, a new allocation carries AUD 500 and each additional ASN held carries AUD 100 a year. The charging regime began on 1 January 2025. That is ordinary fee administration until the number is for a documented experiment, where a line missed in a schedule can become the most interesting line on the bill.

The Executive Council's 22 February 2025 minutes record the snag precisely. Experimental IPv4 and IPv6 allocations were already excluded from annual fee calculation. The schedule said nothing about experimental ASNs because APNIC had not previously charged for ASNs. Once the new fee arrived, the old silence acquired a price. Vivek Nigam described the oversight and recommended a correction. Sumon Ahmed Sabir proposed Resolution 2025-07, Roopinder Singh Perhar seconded it, and the Council passed it unanimously.

The resolution instructed APNIC to amend the Member Fee Schedule so ASNs allocated for experimental purposes under its resource policy would incur no fee. The current schedule now says it in both fee rows: experimental ASN allocations are excluded from the one-off allocation charge and the annual ASN charge. This is the attractive kind of bureaucracy: a sentence removed from the invoice instead of added to the application.

The laboratory still has a door. APNIC's resource policy requires a qualifying experiment described in an Experimental RFC or another openly available document APNIC accepts. Material details and results must be public. Experimental resources are registered in Whois, issued on a one-year licence, and can be revoked for commercial or undocumented use. Applicants need an APNIC account; existing members pay nothing extra for the experimental allocation. The exemption solves the ASN fee mismatch while those conditions continue to decide who enters.

Sabir's APNIC biography puts the motion in context. He serves on the Council and has worked in Bangladesh's network-operator and policy communities for decades. The record gives him a specific role here: he moved the correction. It gives the diagnosis to Nigam and the decision to the full Council. There is no published count of experimental ASN applicants helped by the change. The documented result is narrower and solid: a new charge met an old experimental exception, and the fee schedule now has the missing line.