IPv6 "+" speed running | the era of "traffic improvement", who will lead the IPv6 scale deployment

With the full opening of the digital economy era, the role of the network in supporting the high-quality development of the economy and society has become increasingly prominent. As the base of the digital economy, IPv6 is the direction of Internet upgrading and evolution and network technology innovation, supporting the construction of digital China from the aspects of digital government, digital society, digital economy and digital ecology.

In order to accelerate the deployment of IPv6 scale, in July 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Central Cyberspace Administration of China jointly issued the "Three-Year Special Action Plan for IPv6 Traffic Improvement (2021-2023)", focusing on the overall goal of IPv6 traffic improvement, which not only clarifies the key development tasks for the next three years, but also promotes the development of the IPv6 industry into a new era of "traffic improvement".

Under the strong guidance of the policy, basic telecommunications enterprises, Internet enterprises, CDN manufacturers, and terminal manufacturers continue to improve IPv6 network capabilities, promote APP IPv6 upgrades, and accelerate the transformation of IPv6 terminals, and the results of scale deployment are becoming increasingly prominent. Statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that by the end of 2021, the proportion of IPv6 traffic on mainland mobile networks will increase from 17.21% at the end of 2020 to 35.15%. Towards 2022, as IPv6 is applied on a larger scale, IPv6 network capabilities will be further enhanced, and the proportion of IPv6 traffic in both mobile networks and fixed networks will continue to increase.

ICT vendors accelerate IPv6 scale deployments

Compact the digital base

Since July 2021, the four basic telecommunications enterprises of China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Radio and Television have further accelerated the pace of infrastructure transformation, and on the basis of fully completing the upgrading of 4G, 5G and fixed broadband networks IPv6, they have continued to promote the transformation and upgrading of data centers, CDNs, and cloud networks, and accelerated the replacement of old broadband terminals in combination with the landing of "double gigabit" and other services.

In 2022, the development and construction of IPv6 in the mainland ushered in a new era, and the infinite possibilities contained in IPv6 eventually need to be released by technological innovation and practice. Li Zhenbin, Huawei's chief IP protocol expert and member of the Internet Architecture Committee of the IETF, pointed out that IPv6 is currently facing innovation and development opportunities, and the most important applications are 5G, cloud, industrial Internet, and Internet of Things, and these new applications promote the development of IPv6.

"IPv6+" is a comprehensive upgrade of the next-generation Internet based on IPv6, focusing on ultra-wide, wide connectivity, automation, low latency, determinism and security, and has the key capabilities of connecting everything downward, "jumping into the cloud" upwards, and global security and credibility, which can meet the network requirements of digital transformation in various industries. "IPv6+" has developed in parallel with the new generation of information technology such as the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, blockchain, artificial intelligence and 5G, and has become the network base of "new infrastructure" and plays an important role in the construction of digital China.

In recent years, Huawei has been committed to helping the development of the "IPv6+" industry, actively participating in the formulation of the "IPv6+" standard, accelerating the "IPv6+" technological innovation, and providing the world's leading "IPv6+" products and solutions. In terms of standards, Huawei and its industry partners at home and abroad jointly promote the definition of the "IPv6+" standard to gradually enhance the mainland's contribution to the field of Internet technology standards, and in terms of technological innovation, Huawei continues to build a comprehensive leading capability in segmented routing, network slicing, new multicast, and intelligent lossless. In terms of commercial deployment, Huawei focuses on the digital transformation of the industry, providing "IPv6+"-based intelligent cloud network solutions for digital government, finance, transportation, energy, telecommunications and other industries, and has been successfully deployed in more than 100 networks around the world.

As the first manufacturer in China to obtain the first phase of IPv6 Ready certification, ZTE has developed a dual-stack operating system platform with independent intellectual property rights and a full range of IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack digital communication products. At the same time, in order to cope with the new requirements put forward by the computing power network on the existing IP infrastructure, ZTE proposes an enhanced IPv6 computing power network solution, which can achieve deep integration of the computing network, while giving the network the perception and routing ability of the computing power, it can maintain the smooth evolution of the existing network and protect the operator's investment in the existing network infrastructure.

IPv6 transformation of application infrastructure is an important part of IPv6 scale deployment. As an IT basic platform service provider that carries the main web application traffic in China, Wangsu Technology has been carrying out research on IPv6-related technologies since 2013, and has been committed to providing support for the IPv6 transformation of the rest of the industrial chain. It is reported that the large-scale deployment of IPv6 in the network has made positive progress. Domestic IPv6 resources cover the three major operators of China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, and also cover education networks, China Radio and Television, etc.; regionally, China has covered 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) in China; and overseas areas have covered Asia-Pacific, Europe, South America, North America, Africa, Oceania and other regions. In terms of application facilities, all 57 components of the platform's hardware and software facilities have completed IPv6 upgrades, and all product lines such as Web services, video services, download services, and network security support IPv6. At present, Wangsu has obtained more than 20 IPv6-related invention patents and software copyrights, and more than 200 users use Wangsu IPv6 products, covering many industries such as government, finance, radio and television, media, education, and automobiles.

Starnet Ruijie is a domestic mainstream network and communication terminal product provider, its subsidiary Ruijie Network has been continuously investing in product technology research and development in the field of IPv6, especially in the education market has an absolute advantage. At present, IPv6 equipment has been sold and has dual-stack networking capabilities, maintaining the advanced level of the industry. In April 2021, Ruijie Network Wireless Access Point "RG-AP820-A" officially passed the IPv6 Ready core protocol Phase-2 test in the global IPv6 test center, and won the IPv6 Ready Logo Phase-2 certification issued by the international organization IPv6 Forum, which marks that the IPv6 core protocol of the above products has fully complied with the IETF RFC related standards, and its consistency and interoperability have been authoritatively verified.

"BAT" speeds up application upgrades

Helping IPv6 "Traffic Boost"

IPv6 is an inevitable trend in the evolution and upgrading of the Internet. Thanks to the strong guidance of policies and the coordinated progress of the whole industry, the large-scale deployment of IPv6 in mainland China has achieved remarkable results, IPv6 traffic has been greatly improved, and IPv6-based application innovations have emerged. Monitoring data from the Cyberspace Administration of China shows that as of the end of December 2021, 200 mobile applications (APP) used by mainland netizens with high frequency support IPv6 access, with an average IPv6 traffic accounting for 52.89%, of which 87 APP IPv6 traffic accounted for more than 65%.

In the past three years, Alibaba has actively promoted the deployment and application of IPv6 on a large scale in the technology ecosystem, promoting new technologies, creating new formats, and exploring new models. Alibaba began to reserve various technologies in 2012; in 2018, the core technology stack of Alibaba Cloud and the application business had IPv6 capabilities; in 2019, it launched a large-scale IPv6 migration to improve the scale of IPv6 deployment and application; and the "Double Eleven" shopping festival in 2020 reached a milestone, and the e-commerce business was fully and fully linked to launch IPv6. At present, Alibaba Cloud's core cloud computing products have supported IPv6, supporting users on the cloud to better use IPv6 and reducing the cost of IPv6 transformation. Alibaba's group-wide application monthly active IPv6 users have exceeded 600 million, the IPv6 traffic of 12 app core applications accounts for more than 50%, and the "national-level" APP Taobao, Tmall, Idle Fish, and AutoNavi IPv6 traffic account for more than 80%. The large-scale migration of Alibaba's Internet application business to IPv6 also fully proves that the mainland IPv6 network and various infrastructures have matured to support large-scale deployment, application and innovation.

Tencent established the IPv6 working group in 2010, which has been tested in actual combat in QQ, WeChat, King glory and other services, and the IPv6 technology reserve has a solid foundation, and has successively become an IPv6 application that can provide external services. In 2019, the strategy of promoting IPv6 through the whole ecosystem was launched, and at present, certain results have been achieved in the transformation of public cloud, CDN, IDC, and APP, and on the basis of giving priority to the transformation of public cloud products including cloud hosts, container engines, load balancing, etc., we have further completed the transformation of nearly 100 public cloud products and provided services online, providing good IPv6 platform support for many third-party network applications. At the same time, cdN nodes are transformed and upgraded, and the CDN IPv6 node resources and geographical coverage resources are close to IPv4, which greatly improves the service performance of IPv6 network application acceleration capabilities. In the next step, Tencent will continue to improve the service capabilities and quality of networks and applications, vigorously promote the integration and innovative development of IPv6 new technologies and various economic and social fields, expand the coverage of public cloud products, and give priority to ensuring the service performance of public cloud products; optimize the quality and acceleration performance of CDN networks; increase the proportion of IPv6 traffic in APP, complete IPv6 coverage of all provincial-level administrative units, and provide users with better services.

In terms of APP transformation, Baidu has carried out a number of work, such as opening up an IPv6 special area in the mobile assistant app store, guiding netizens to install IPv6 APP, and Baidu Map Open Platform providing developers with API, SDK, browser and other access methods in IPv6 format. At present, Baidu's basic network has fully supported IPv6. In the next step, Baidu will promote IPv6 scale deployment in three phases. In the first stage, data center network interconnection, DNS, and load balancer fully support IPv6, search APP, information flow, and Mini Program support IPv6 only and IPv4/IPv6 dual stacks, and the application advertising system continues to conduct ad effect comparison experiment on IPv6 user traffic. In the second stage, the basic network security, CDN, GTC, and backbone network fully support IPv4/IPv6 dual stacks, video, games, AR services and SDK fully support IPv6, complete the advertising effect experiment of IPv6 traffic, support full access to user IPv6 traffic, and support IPv6 for crawler spider spiders on the whole network. In the third stage, the data center internal network transmission supports IPv4/IPv6 dual stacks, which is ready for full support for IPv6 only.

Promoting the large-scale deployment of IPv6 will be a comprehensive upgrade of the mainland Internet technology industry ecology, which will profoundly affect the innovation and transformation of network information technology, industry and application, and will promote the rapid development of emerging fields such as mobile Internet, Internet of Things, industrial Internet, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence.

End

This article was first published in Communications World Magazine, February 10, 2022, Issue 4, Issue 889

Author: Mei Yaxin

Editor-in-Charge/Layout: Fan Fan

Review: Shen Qing

Producer: Liu Qicheng

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