NDRC & IPv6: Hey Sixy, Where You Goin’?

Posted on August 25, 2008
Filed Under Apparatchiks, Beijing Olympics, China Business, China Internet, Mobile |

The National Development and Reform Commission of China has released a special notice on the commercial trial and the equipment industrialization of IPv6 on its official website.

…The notice says that to actively promote the application and the industry development of China’s next-generation Internet business, a commercial trial of the next-generation Internet business and the equipment industrialization will be organized in accordance with the overall arrangement of the sample project of China’s next-generation Internet. The notice emphasizes “vigorously promoting” the commercial trial of IPv6, increasing the trial users of IPv6 to over 500,000 before the end of 2010, actively promoting the transfer of the next-generation Internet from testing to commercial use and fostering a new economic growth point for the healthy development of China’s information industry.

The NDRC also requires the equipment industrialization of the next-generation Internet in the notice. It says that to support the application and the commercial trial of new technologies, China should realize mass production of key IPv6 equipment with independent intellectual property rights.

I guess they were happy with the IPv6 backbone for the Olympics. The NDRC wants to match the met IPv6 objectives at the Olympics: monitoring and multicasting video. But that’s the boring bit.

From what I could make out from the announcement they’re looking for an IPv6 pilot to provide connectivity for small and medium businesses via xDSL and fiber LANs (the ubiquitous connectivity technologies in China’s big cities), IPv6 gateways for mobile devices (should be top of the list), IPv6-based HD digital media (more CCTV!), testing equipment (ensure a seat at the standards table), blah, blah, and blah (the NDRC announcement, in Chinese, can be found here).

Other than some of the nifty video ‘casting, the technologies don’t really need IPv6. IPv4 works just fine. It’s just that China’s pretty darn quick internet growth is making IPv4 address depletion a localized reality.

All this is significant because there hasn’t been any big, commercial, IPv6 roll outs. Organizations and consortiums (mostly in education) have built big, intercontinental networks, but it’s never been adopted on such a broad scale. It looks like the NDRC wants China to be the first.

And this provides a competitive leg up for Chinese firms in developing, deploying, and testing IPv6 networks and lots of time and money to invest in value-added applications that exploit IPv6 technology to the hilt. That’s what that little “independent intellectual property rights” squib at the end of the article was about.

And the bigger picture is the government’s dislike of foreign technology sitting at the core of vital communications systems. I’m surprised the NDRC waited all of 10 hours after the close of the Olympics to announce this.