China pushes for network upgrade blitz as IPv6 adoption slows
- Reference: 1720588693
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/07/10/china_ipv6_update/
- Source link:
State-controlled media on Tuesday [1]covered the proceedings of the third China IPv6 Innovation and Development Conference, at which officials revealed that as of May 2024 the Middle Kingdom was home to 794 million users of the protocol, and that 64.56 percent of mobile traffic – plus 21.21 percent of fixed network traffic – is carried on networks that employ it.
In July last year, the previous edition of the conference delivered news that 763 million active IPv6 users could be found as of May 2023 – up from the 697 million active users China's State Council [2]counted as of July 2022.
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Even accounting for the slightly longer reporting periods, it seems inescapable that adoption of IPv6 in the region has slowed.
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The nation is, however, closing in on [6]goals to achieve an IPv6 user population of 800 million by 2025, plus 70 per cent of mobile traffic running over the protocol. A target to have 15 percent of fixed traffic on IPv6 has been met.
And last year Beijing issued an order that has mighty potential to accelerate IPv6: a [7]requirement that all new Wi-Fi routers sold in China must be capable of running IPv6 and use it by default once powered on.
[8]China working on standard for brain-computer interfaces
[9]Chinese government website security is often worryingly bad, say Chinese researchers
[10]250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn't built to use them
[11]IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS
Over the next twelve months, Beijing will enact a plan to promote IPv6 in eight cities with a combined population of over 110 million. Consumers, government agencies, and datacenter operators across the metropoli – including Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzen – will take part in a "special action" to promote IPv6 adoption, in pursuit of short-term goals and China's aspiration to become the world's most prolific user of the protocol.
Analysis of IPv6 adoption trends suggests China is well short of that goal. Akamai [12]measures IPv6 adoption and rates India, Malaysia, Germany, and France as the leaders, with China the 61st-ranked nation at 22.2 percent adoption. The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre [13]rates India as the world's IPv6 leader with 79.85 percent of networks capable of handling the protocol, ahead of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, France, and Germany … with China at 36.71 percent.
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Beijing sees networked technology as essential to its economic development, but China's IPv4 allocation covered just over 330 million addresses. That's around one address per 245 people – well below the ratio of people to IPv4 addresses enjoyed in other nations.
While workarounds like network address translation offer a way to connect many more devices to IPv4 networks, IPv6 includes features that improve network performance, manageability, and observability.
That last point matters in a surveillance state – especially one like China that closely polices its internet to detect and remove content the government deems inappropriate, and to identify the people who posted it. ®
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[1] https://news.sina.com.cn/zx/gj/2024-07-07/doc-inccimqi9001552.shtml
[2] http://english.scio.gov.cn/whitepapers/2022-11/07/content_78505694_4.htm
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Zo5bx6XB5@hRSNziCUhnPQAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zo5bx6XB5@hRSNziCUhnPQAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zo5bx6XB5@hRSNziCUhnPQAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/china_single_stack_ipv6_notice/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/17/china_networking_hardware/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/china_brain_computer_interface_standard/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/03/china_gov_web_vuln/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/09/240_4_ipv4_block_activism/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/05/aws_ipv4_cash/
[12] https://www.akamai.com/internet-station/cyber-attacks/state-of-the-internet-report/ipv6-adoption-visualization
[13] https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zo5bx6XB5@hRSNziCUhnPQAAANc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I'm surprised their adoption is so low
They are basically a captive network, only those who are allowed to pierce the Great Firewall require IPv4. I would have thought every ISP and every major and almost all minor websites in China would support IPv6.
Anyone know why the adoption is so low when it seems from the outside like they should be able to get both the mobile and fixed numbers above 90% with little difficulty?
Re: I'm surprised their adoption is so low
Anyone know why the adoption is so low when it seems from the outside like they should be able to get both the mobile and fixed numbers above 90% with little difficulty?
I would have to guess somewhere in the path between the end systems (typically "hosts") there are components (IS) that don't yet grok IPv6, or just as likely - or more likely - that those components haven't been configured for IPv6 or there isn't anyone that knows how to, or possibly where or how to access the device.
If the Middle Kingdom isn't overflowing with networking engineers that are the full bottle on routing in nation state scale IPv6 networks you might suspect its not all IPv6 down to the backbone :)
Re: I'm surprised their adoption is so low
Actually, the main pain point is mobile devices and mobile networks around the world have moved to IPv6 on the network but lots of them still use 6to4 gateways to talk to the rest of the world. And this is how it should be: we're not supposed to notice the move to IPv6, things should just work.
Not sure about the maths here
Great article. Thx.
However, if I read correctly, if 330 million IPv4 addresses correspond to "one address per 245 people", that would make
China's population 330 million * 245 = 81 Billion people,
which is a very Dr Evil-esque number.
The year of IPv6 on the CPE was twelve years ago
And last year Beijing issued an order that has mighty potential to accelerate IPv6: a requirement that all new Wi-Fi routers sold in China must be capable of running IPv6 and use it by default once powered on. Considering 2012 was "the year of IPv6 on the CPE" when all the big manufacturers of Customer Premises Equipment integrated IPv6 into their modems, routers and access points I doubt that is going to make a serious dent. For at least a decade now you would have to look really hard to find CPE that doesn't support IPv6.
In my experience it's not the devices that people own that are the limiting factor, they've all been supporting IPv6 by default for many years. Server side it's not going too badly either. It's [1]more than a decade ago that Meta disabled IPv4 internally on their networks and let all their devs and servers use IPv6 only with just some IPv6 to IPv4 translation on the network edge for legacy clients . If you take the dozen or so online services that will make up 80% of all global traffic then all of them are Dual Stack IPv4+IPv6.
No, the weakest links in the chain are ISPs who have sometimes dragged their feet and are preventing an IPv6-capable client to talk to a IPv6-capable server. Oh, and company LANs.
This being China they could just switch some government services to IPv6-only and jail anyone who complains about not being able to file taxes or get a parking permit.
[1] https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/case-study-facebook-moving-to-an-ipv6-only-internal-network/
There's more that you have to be careful of
IPv6 supports extensible headers, which strikes me as a perfect location for a covert data channel. I hope there will be firewalls that can lift that part out of a network packet, but I'm willing that let's-break-standards-so-they-become proprietary Microsoft will find a way to make them somehow essential.
They won't, you say? Ever heard of Kerberos?