China’s Central Cyberspace Administration shared plans to accelerate the implementation of the IPv6 protocol against the background of the ubiquity of cloud services, IoT devices and 5G networks . The country’s authorities have announced a number of ambitious goals for 2022. It is known that China plans to completely switch to IPv6 by 2030.

So, by the end of the year, it is planned to receive 700 million active IPv6 users (with a population of more than 1.4 billion people) and 180 million IPv6 connections of Internet of Things devices, and by this time 13% of the traffic of fixed communication networks and 45% of mobile traffic should also be transferred to the new protocol. 85% of government, as well as key commercial online services, will also have to master IPv6.

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Finally, this protocol should be enabled by default in all new home routers. The government also intends to encourage the transition to IPv6 of cloud platforms, streaming services and a number of key industries such as the financial sector and agriculture. This is partly a necessary measure, as the country’s telecommunications sector is in dire need of new tools due to the constant and rather rapid growth, which is facilitated by China’s overall digitalization plan.

Only in the first quarter of 2022, according to the Ministry of Industry and Informatization of the PRC, cloud services revenues grew by 138.1% compared to the same period last year, while the Big Data and IoT sectors grew by 59.1% and 23.9%, respectively. . The country has also made obvious progress in the construction of 5G base stations. By the end of March, their number in China reached 1.56 million units, of which 134,000 were built in the first three months of the year.

Image Source: Huawei

Under these conditions, the spread of IPv6 is critical. The new plan of the Chinese authorities provides for “the active participation of the nation” in the formation of not only local but also international standards for the Internet of the future. In China, they intend to promote the new New IP standard instead of the usual TCP / IP stack. Huawei proposed it to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), although the development of relevant standards is mainly carried out by the IETF and IEEE.

However, the initiative was lukewarmly received by these international institutions, since the new protocol does not guarantee backward compatibility and actually duplicates the work already being done by the IEEE and IETF. Cisco claims that the existing standards are quite consistent with Chinese requests. In addition, the use of existing solutions will avoid the precedent of China pushing through the standard through the mediation of the ITU, which normally has nothing to do with this process.

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