Mastering Internet sovereignty in the IPv6 era is a war we cannot afford to lose

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• For the Chinese Internet, the large-scale deployment of IPv6 is a battle that cannot be lost.
• In the IPv4 era, there are 13 root servers in the world (the main root is in the United States), but none of them is in China. Therefore, many self-media have said before that once foreign countries cut off our access to the root servers, our network will be paralyzed.
• In 2017, China deployed four of the IPv6 root servers, breaking the dilemma of China not having root servers in the past. After years of construction, my country's IPv6 network highway has now been built. But at the same time, we must face up to the reality that the scale of commercial use of IPv6 is relatively slow.

"China's network infrastructure already fully supports IPv6, and China's IPv6 development has taken a solid step forward." At the "2020-2021 Global IPv6 Development and Outlook" seminar held recently, Wen Ku, Vice Chairman and Secretary-General of the China Communications Standards Association, said that in recent years, the large-scale deployment of IPv6 in my country has shown a good development momentum and has made positive progress. The IPv6 network highway has been built.

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This is undoubtedly a huge benefit, because for the Chinese Internet, the large-scale deployment of IPv6 is a battle that cannot be lost.

So, why is IPv6 so important? To borrow the words of 5G, "5G is not just 1G more than 4G" and "5G is not equal to 4G+1G". As the next generation IP protocol version, IPv6 is "not just 2 higher than IPv4".

IPv6 is vital to us both from the perspective of technology itself and from the perspective of national security.

From a technical perspective, the further development of the Internet requires sufficient IP addresses so that each device connected to the network has its own "house number" so that information can be transmitted effectively and meet the needs of information exchange between people, people and things, and things and things.

As we all know, the IPv4 protocol address is 32 bits long, with a total of about 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses. When the Internet began to become popular in the 1980s and 1990s, the space for 4.3 billion addresses seemed very huge, just as Bill Gates, who was in his 20s at the time, boasted: "640K of memory is enough for everyone."

However, with the rapid development of the Internet and PC industries, everyone realized that what Bill Gates said was quite unreliable. In fact, 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses are not as many as imagined. The industry has long suffered from IPv4 depletion.

In fact, around 2014, since IPv4 addresses had basically been allocated, some users who needed IPv4 private addresses could only consider purchasing them from companies with more addresses.

Originally, the IPv4 "cake" is not big, and there is a serious problem of uneven distribution. The United States has three-quarters of the world's IPv4 addresses, about 3 billion, while Asia, the most populous country, has less than 400 million IPv4 addresses. Specifically in my country, there are about 200 million IPv4 addresses, with an average of 0.15 per person. In contrast, the average number of IPv4 addresses in the United States is 4. Therefore, the problem of IP address shortage in my country has always been extremely prominent.

With the advent of the 5G era and the rapid development of mobile Internet and Internet of Things services, massive devices are connecting to the network, creating a greater demand for IP addresses. Various devices require addresses and their own "house numbers."

In this context, IPv6 needs to be popularized faster because it can provide 2 to the power of 128 IP addresses.

The outside world often uses this example to describe that the number of IPv6 addresses is so large that an address can be assigned to every grain of sand on the earth.

In addition to bringing more IP addresses, more importantly, from the perspective of network security and network sovereignty, we must also accelerate the large-scale deployment of IPv6.

In the global Internet system, root servers are crucial, and domain name resolution queries must start from root servers. In the IPv4 era, there are 13 root servers in the world (the main root is in the United States), but none of them is in China. Therefore, many self-media have said that once foreign countries cut off our access to root servers, our network will be paralyzed.

In the past, this statement was correct. Later, as multiple global root server mirrors were established in my country, the stability and security of my country's Internet was improved to a certain extent, because the root server mirrors can provide domain name resolution services like the "original".

But the drawback is that once it is cut off, we cannot use the latest data content on the root server through mirroring. So fundamentally, we need to break the old pattern and have our own root server in the IPv6 era.

According to domestic media reports, as early as 2017, the "Snowman Project" initiated by my country's Next Generation Internet National Engineering Center has completed the installation of 25 IPv6 root servers around the world. China has deployed 4 of them, breaking the dilemma of China's lack of root servers in the past.

Based on the above considerations, my country attaches great importance to the large-scale deployment of IPv6, especially after the General Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Action Plan for Promoting the Large-Scale Deployment of Internet Protocol IPv6" in November 2017. With the promotion of government departments and the "main force" telecom operators, good results have been achieved.

For example, China Telecom has comprehensively promoted the IPv6 transformation of its infrastructure and has now completed the IPv6 transformation and configuration of more than 10,000 metropolitan area network devices, more than 2,400 backbone network devices, nearly 20,000 backbone circuits, and 470 IDCs. Currently, fixed networks, mobile networks, IDCs, and clouds all support IPv6.

After years of construction, my country's IPv6 network highway has now been built. But at the same time, we must face up to the reality that the scale of IPv6 commercial use is relatively slow.

The Action Plan for Promoting Large-Scale Deployment of Internet Protocol IPv6, issued in 2017, proposed that by the end of 2020, my country's IPv6 users should reach 500 million, accounting for more than 50% of China's Internet users. But in fact, at the end of 2020, the number of active IPv6 users in my country was 435 million, accounting for about 46.27% of China's Internet users, which did not meet the target. In the development of my country's communications industry, it is very rare to fail to meet the set goals, but this time it happened to IPv6.

The development of IPv6 is now facing the same "test" as 5G. We need to encourage more users to use IPv6 and allow more "cars" to run on the "IPv6 highway". Only in this way can the value of IPv6 be truly reflected and its healthy development be promoted.

Whether it is IPv4 or IPv6, users are unaware of it when using it. The key lies in the application side. The next step requires greater efforts to promote it, especially for Internet content providers, to upgrade and convert platforms and services to IPv6.

In short, IPv6, like 5G, must form a virtuous development model of "construction to promote use, and use to promote construction."