China pushes for network upgrade blitz as IPv6 adoption slows China's adoption of IPv6 – a goal the government in Beijing has prioritized – appears to have slowed. State-controlled media on Tuesday 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 …
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?
I can remember my IPv6 prefix and can work out the address of every server, because they are based on a logical structure. I only remember 1 of my IPv4 prefixes without looking it up, and the servers in that prefix have "random" addresses that I have to look up every time...
Although of course the main reason I don't have every IP address memorised is because very few services get accessed by IP address...
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?
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 :)
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.
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 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.
in the UK the biggest problems are:
AS5089 NTL
AS13285 TalkTalk Communications Limited
AS6871 PLUSNET UK Internet Service Provider
AS206067 H3GUK
AS35228 O2BROADBAND
and you can tell that all of these networks are not being invested in their infrastructure or core networking teams if I was a investor I would be asking about this in company meetings
OFCOM once agreed (2007) that when IPv6 reached sufficient penetration in the UK they'd require ISPs offer it
When it passed 30% I asked them what "sufficient penetration" was and they refused to answer the question
This is another area the newly incoming government needs to address, amongst many others
No, the weakest links in the chain are ISPs...
What he said.
I'm on my third or fourth generation of IPv6 capable firewall/router/WAP. But my ISP doesn't support IPv6 for residential customers. I've got symmetric 500Mbit optical fiber service (for another $20 a month, I could have 1Gb), but I can't use IPv6. I don't really care, because I haven't run across a real reason to use IPv6. However, 10-15 years ago I'd have bet I would be using IPv6 long before I had the option of (affordable) symmetric 1Gb optical fiber service at home.
I think you're missing the point... You need the vast majority of end users on IPv6 before an IPv4-free service becomes viable.
The bigger networks have already deployed IPv6. However John got his "tech savvy" friend to "configure his router" (because simply plugging it in sounded too complicated) and the first thing his friend did was change every single setting, including disabling IPv6 "because you don't need that". And when they get a new router they will get the same friend to screw with that as well... They will be the ones tying up the support queue with complaints that your servers aren't reachable...
"You need the vast majority of end users on IPv6 before an IPv4-free service becomes viable."
It all depends what you mean. End users aren't really the sticking point - their devices these days all support a dual stack. Consumer ISPs are part of the problem, as already mentioned, but more and more of them are finding "Carrier-Grade" NAT more and more expensive and troublesome, so I think they will shift over time, and all the major service providers are there already. The hard core of "No IPv6, no way!" seems to be smaller corporate networks that don't yet see a business case - after all, if their public web presence goes via Cloudflare etc., they can support IPv6 users anyway.
El Reg, of course, is very backward for reasons that escape me.
You can put your strawman away: the vast majority of people never touch their router as evinced by the use of default passwords on them. My local network is IPv4 but my uplink is IPv6 and the provider has a 6to4 gateway and it's been like this for the last 4 years. More and more mobile networks are going IPv6 internally – places like China and India don't really have a choice – but the users don't notice. Services will go dual-stack as an when: I can get an IPv6 connection to YouTube if I want, El Reg on the other hand…
Even with the PRC's huge population the size of IPv6 address space (128 bits) means its entirely conceivable to assign a distinct routing prefix to each and every individual (and every other entity.)
It's not inconceivable that when an individual connects to a network service they will be required to authenticate and part of their assigned prefix used to route traffic through this connection. (Splitting the prefix would permit concurrent multiple distinct connections for users. eg home, travel, work.) Probably also requiring IPSec isn't a big step after this.
With no NAT and all traffic having an identifiable source or destination even using a vpn will quickly attract the attention of the red thought plod.
I can see in the PRC, access to satellite comms and networks will be stomped on rather heavily in the near future if it's not already the case.
I don't believe for a minute that the PRC can pull this off - as far as I can see they are, despite all attempts to project otherwise, governed by a mob of duffers that wouldn't have distinguished themselves from the members of the last UK (Tory) government and in that event, certainly not by a surfeit of competence.
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