The IPv6 in-depth promotion meeting was held in Beijing. Why does China want to promote IPv6 "desperately"?

Recently, the "Conference on Deepening the Implementation of IPv6 Large-Scale Deployment and Application" was successfully held in Beijing.

This is the first time that IPv6 has returned to the public eye since 2017.

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Unprecedented promotion efforts

In 2017, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Action Plan for Promoting Large-Scale Deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)", officially firing the first shot in the promotion of IPv6.

As of July 1, 2021, according to the "National IPv6 Development Monitoring Platform", the number of active IPv6 Internet users in my country has exceeded 528 million.

The number of IPv6 addresses owned is 59,030 blocks/32, surpassing the United States for the first time and ranking first in the world with a proportion of 18.08%.

The support rate for website applications of IPv6 has also been increasing year by year.

• The support rate for central ministries and provincial government portals is 68.14%
• The support rate of the central enterprise portal website is 48.08%
• The support rate of the central key news media website is 81.25%
• The support rate for the portal websites of financial central enterprises is 69.57%
• The support rate of the Double First-Class University website is 53.28%
• The support rate of the websites of the units under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is 44.23%
• The support rate of the top 100 Internet websites is 40.22%
• The support rate of Top 100 mobile Internet applications is 99%

The national IPv6 traffic ratio is still at a low level, but the comprehensive IPv6 development index of each province, autonomous region and municipality is generally higher than 50%.

A handful of bitter tears

It is not difficult to see that although IPv6 has not yet been fully popularized, about half of the websites already support IPv6 networks. Why do we still see various 404 errors when opening some mainstream websites?

It is very challenging to make IPv6 mainstream.

First of all, if an application needs to support IPv6 network and access normally, it depends on the following factors:

• IPv6 access capabilities of backbone networks, metropolitan area networks, and access networks
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) IPv6 Application Acceleration Capabilities
• IPv6 service carrying capacity of cloud service platform
• IPv6 coverage capabilities of data centers (IDCs)
• IPv6 support capabilities of terminal devices
• IPv6 Concentration in Internet Applications

These factors restrict whether an application can be accessed normally in an IPv6 network environment. If one or more of them have problems, the application will inevitably be inaccessible.

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In addition, even if some websites support IPv6, it will affect the user experience.

For example, Baidu search supports IPv6 resolution, but when you open the "Baidu Image" search, various blanks will still appear in the IPv6 network environment, because the website from the third party may not support IPv6.

Why vigorously promote IPv6?

There are many difficulties in promoting IPv6. So why is China still working so hard to develop IPv6?

(1) Development needs

With the development of the Internet, more and more Internet-connected devices have appeared, and the number of Internet users has also increased dramatically, which means that more and more IP addresses are needed.

However, the current IPv4 has only about 4.29 billion IP addresses, which is far from meeting the demand. The number of IPv6 addresses is extremely large, and even if one IP is assigned to every grain of sand on the earth, it would be more than enough.

Meeting the needs of Internet development is the fundamental reason for vigorously promoting IPv6.

(2) Change the competition track

Developed countries such as Europe and the United States have far more IPv4 addresses than other developing countries due to the early development of the Internet. There is even a situation where the number of IP addresses owned by a single university in the United States exceeds the total number of IP addresses in China.

Since IPv4 addresses cannot be allocated fairly and are now exhausted, changing track is a good option.

Since gasoline car engines are difficult to manufacture, we developed electric cars. Today, my country's electric cars have strong international competitiveness.

The US dollar hegemony cannot be challenged, so we will develop the digital RMB and compete in a different track.

The 13 IPv4 root servers are distributed in developed countries such as the United States. After changing track, China already has 1 main root server and 3 auxiliary root servers.

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In the foreseeable future, IPv6 will definitely replace IPv4, but this road is full of challenges. I believe that with the country's vigorous promotion, China will popularize IPv6 networks faster than other countries.