IPv6: Start the Doomsday Clock at 830 Days
Posted on September 23, 2008
Filed Under China Internet, Mobile, Wireless Networks |
China Tech News reports:
The Internet in China may soon run out. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, under the current allocation speed, China’s IPv4 address resources can only meet the demand of 830 more days and if no proper measures are taken by then, new Chinese netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet.
…Li says that a new IPv6 network address, which is a basic network resource without these limitations, has been developed in America, but this kind of IP address is only used among educational websites in China. To use the IPv6 network address, network operators need to spend a lot of time and money on equipment updating.
CNNIC now has started hosting seminars to remind the operators to apply for the remaining IP addresses as soon as possible for a storage in addition to call for a preparation for the providing of IPv6 addresses to netizens.
There has been doom and gloom about the lack of IPv4 addresses for years, but China’s flabbergasting internet growth has made the problem acute. Addresses assigned to China are running out as more servers go live and commercial and home internet connectivity rapidly increases. The (unidentified) rate of growth doesn’t even address what I think will be the next connectivity boom in China: mobile devices.
As tempting as it is may be to declare this the end times and hole up in some digital Decameron, the IP apocalypse really isn’t upon us. ISPs can fiddle around with network address translation (NAT) to support internet access (although it would be problematic for serving internet content). This would slow, but not stop, address allocation.
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s governmental futurologists-cum-arm-twisters, have already made IPv6 a priority. China already has a university network, the telecoms companies have deployed their own versions for internal use, and the Olympics ran an IPv6 network. Indeed, any networkable device or computer on the market today will support IPv6. The technology is in place and works.
But the big problem is in switching over to IPv6 from IPv4. There’s just no way to do it in one fell swoop. And even if it were possible to switch over easily, there’s the small problem of the rest of the world. There are no public, commercial, IPv6 networks out there. China would need to build a IPv6-to-IPV4 to support connectivity to the rest of the internet.
The address allocation issue is fundamentally a technical issue that everyone on the internet will have to deal with at some point. The speed with which China has embraced the internet and the size of its internet population makes the same problem much more severe.
It will be interesting to see how the government decides to address the problem. A good start would be to require new, large private networks (in the sense they are managed by a particular organization - particularly mobile) to use IPv6. IPv4 gateways can be used to connect to the legacy internet. Assuming the addressing is done right (not too tricky), the address-to-name DNS services are correctly configured for the private and public networks (tricky), and the data routing designed to support a future knitting together of the networks (fiendishly tricky), some form of coexistence should be functional.
Functional, but not necessarily robust. And there still remains the rest of the internet and its various government administrators. The NDRC can’t crack the whip over them.
Oh, and all this will (according to CNNIC) happen just in time for the Shanghai Expo.
Comments
One Response to “IPv6: Start the Doomsday Clock at 830 Days”
Leave a Reply
RSS
[...] Checked today, it is very fading fast…so you better go to Catching Mice and find out why the Chinese internet is disappearing… [...]