Some Chinese Networks See ‘High Level’ of IPv6 Readiness, But Commercial Takeup Lags
China’s leadership is strongly backing the rollout of IPv6, said Asia Pacific Network Information Center Director General Paul Wilson in an interview. Some sectors, such as academia and research, have “achieved a very high level of IPv6 readiness,” but local content providers and enterprises in the Asia Pacific region and China still have some way to go, he said. One sign of China’s interest in promoting the new technology is that it’s hosting its 11th summit on IPv6 this week in Beijing, he said. APNIC is one of the five regional Internet registries that allocates IP addresses. IPv6 is the latest version of the protocol that routes traffic across the Internet.
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As in other parts of the world, “there are disparities in IPv6 deployment density among the Internet stakeholders such as core networks, access networks, content providers and enterprises in the AP region and China,” Wilson said. Transit network providers “clearly have IPv6 capability in their core.” Local content providers and businesses in the area “still have some space to grow” in adopting IPv6 although APNIC is starting to see some readiness, while major global content providers such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook now have a higher IPv6-readiness level, he said.
Chinese academic and research networks historically have been very IPv6-ready, Wilson said. The end-user readiness of the China Education and Research Network is 100 percent, meaning all end-users on the network can access IPv6 resources on IPv6-ready networks, he said. But deployment in the last mile in commercial networks “is always going to be challenging” because of customer-premises equipment upgrades and customer-provisioning costs, he said. All economies face this challenge, he said.
APNIC is beginning to see positive multistakeholder approaches to increased IPv6 adoption in China, Wilson said. The Chinese State Council said in November 2011 it would put IPv6 into small-scale commercial pilot use and create a mature business model by the end of this year, the People’s Daily Online reported in January 2012. The country will then roll out the IPv6-based network on a large scale and build a bridge between IPv4 and IPv6 services from 2014-2015, it said. The State Council set a goal of three million users for each of three major network operators (China Telcom, Unicom and Mobile) by 2013, and 25 million users as a whole by 2015, Wilson said. The three operators are responding to the mandate, he said. The government is showing positive leadership by “setting up a clear IPv6 roadmap to the industry,” he said.
As a result of such policies, end-user readiness is growing on some networks in China, Wilson said. There’s a significant increase in mobile devices that access the Internet, he said. A January 2013 report by the China Internet Network Information Center (http://xrl.us/bounni) on Internet development in the country found that at the end of last year, China had 422 million mobile Internet users, around 75 percent of whom access the Internet from their phones. The entry of mobile devices onto the Internet is having a huge impact on the demography of users and their behavior, he said.
According to internetworldstats.com, worldwide Internet penetration as of June 2012 was around 30 percent, Wilson said. Given that Europe and North America have around 70 percent penetration, the Asia Pacific/China region “has large space to grow,” he said. That indicates further increasing demand for IP addresses in the near future, he said.
Many organizations in the APNIC region, including China, are aware of that growing demand, Wilson said. Because IPv6 doesn’t provide immediate revenue increase, “it represents a challenge for business decision makers,” he said. Some operators are now beginning to see the need to invest in the new technology rather than “clinging on to IPv4 addresses” and to understand that such investment will help them compete, he said. Those entities that have successfully deployed IPv6 commercial services often do so when they add new customers and set IPv6 as the default IP routing system, or update existing subscribers as they upgrade services, he said.
IPv4 addresses are running out in the Asia Pacific region, Wilson said. There’s a market for them, and APNIC policy allows companies with unused IPv4 address space to transfer them. Various checks and balances ensure that transfer requests are legitimate, and there’s a similar processes in place to handle address transfers between regional Internet registries, he said. If black market (off-registry) transfers are happening -- and APNIC has no specific information they are -- “then we think this devalues the network as a whole by degrading the quality of information we can share about who uses which address,” he said. “We believe the community is fully aware of the importance of registry accuracy, and would use only the easy-to-use registration transfer options that we provide, whenever a resource changes hands,” he said. - Dugie Standeford