Summary

  • Yen-Chieh Wang, a HiNet backbone engineer, joined Ching-Heng Ku and Aftab Siddiqui in proposing that APNIC halve the largest first helping from its 103/8 IPv4 pool: a /23 instead of a /22.
  • APNIC put the smaller ceiling into effect provisionally on 28 February 2019, held back the other /23 for qualifying applicants during public comment, then implemented prop-127 in April.
  • The arithmetic is easy: 512 addresses instead of 1,024. The harder question is who gets a first foothold when a finite address pool is shared across a region.

Half a slice, more seats at the table

Imagine the last tray of sandwiches at a conference. Giving the first person four does not make the tray more generous. APNIC's 103/8 pool had a similar, less edible problem in 2019. Under its then-current rule, an eligible account holder could receive up to a /22: 1,024 IPv4 addresses. A newcomer arriving later would meet whatever remained.

Yen-Chieh Wang helped write the change. APNIC's original prop-127 names him alongside Ching-Heng Ku and Aftab Siddiqui. Their proposal kept the /24 floor of 256 addresses and cut the ceiling to a /23, or 512. Its operational illustration was unusually concrete: a new ISP could use one /24 for its own infrastructure and another for customer assignments and NAT while preparing IPv6 service. The policy distributed a scarce starting kit in smaller boxes.

Wang was no spectator treating prefix lengths as decoration. A 2019 TWNIC forum biography described him as a senior IP operations engineer at Chunghwa Telecom's HiNet, working on its international backbone and the Taiwan Internet Exchange service, TWIX. It also listed routing security and DDoS mitigation among his work. That contemporary biography establishes his operating background; the APNIC proposal establishes what he coauthored. Together they place an engineer who knew the machinery of networks inside an argument over who gets their first addresses.

The temporary rule with a refund desk

The sequence is more revealing than the headline number. Prop-127 entered APNIC's Policy SIG in January 2019 and found support at APNIC 47. On 28 February, APNIC's Executive Council made a provisional /23 limit effective immediately while final public comment continued. For an applicant who qualified for a /22 under the existing policy, APNIC reserved the missing /23. A rejection would have sent that reserved portion to the applicant. Endorsement would release it for other applicants.

That arrangement gave the new ceiling immediate force and gave the old rule an orderly exit. It treated public comment as a live decision point with a tangible inventory attached. The registry was not merely changing a paragraph on a website; it was deciding where the next 512 addresses waited while the argument was still open.

The comment period closed in April. APNIC's proposal history records Executive Council endorsement and implementation on 4 April 2019. APNIC's implementation account confirmed that the interim arrangement ended and the 103/8 maximum stood at /23. Its published resource-policy file, section 6.1, still carries that 2019 ceiling in the 2025 version. Applicants still have to satisfy the separate eligibility rules in section 6.2. Smaller slices change the allocation rule; they do not manufacture addresses.

Original records