Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Conversion to IPv6 is an item in the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025) of the People's Republic of China.[1]

"We will accelerate the large-scale deployment of 5G networks, increase the user penetration rate to 56%, and promote the upgrade of gigabit optical fiber networks. We will build up technology reserves for the future deployment of 6G network technology. We will expand backbone network interconnection nodes, set up a number of new international communication gateways, and comprehensively promote the commercial deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)."

There is a migration schedule.[2][3] As of this month, there are supposed to be no new IPv4 services. The goal is IPv6 only by 2030. Actual adoption in China is reportedly only 25-30%, though.

[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0284_14th_Fi...

[2] https://blog.apnic.net/2019/06/06/100-by-2025-china-getting-...

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/china_ipv6_control_ad...

View on HN

I grow up in China seeing news about the policy of IPv6 adoption every year, but the real adoption rate is still abysmal here.

Is everything NATted? With such a high population it seems hard to manage with limited IPv4 addresses.

yep

I thought they were very accessible in the education (i.e. university) network.

It is visible in the APNIC Labs measurement at 30% and within different AS of China Mobile at 65% or better, it depends province by provice, and provider by provider.

https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN

I don't call this abysmal at all. It very possibly is higher, there are reasons why APNIC may undercount, but noting that APNIC and Akamai tend to agree on their numbers.

Google's own numbers for China are far lower for reasons which do not affect the APNIC or Akamai data.

Majority of them are mobile phones IIRC.

Not nothing, but the adoption rate of IPV6 on computer side is still very low.

Virtually all of India is phones and tablets. It's the highest ipv6 economy. If your criterion is "not handheld devices" then I ask, what makes desktop computers so special?

I believe 80% or more of the planets internet is handhelds.

You think the US home users on comcast are all PC's?

> what makes desktop computers so special

More on the technical side. Most of mobile devices and their modems need (or even allow) zero to no manual configuration, so adopting ipv6 with these hardwares are easy -- the ISP just need to deal with their side.

This is in contrast to "fixed-line" internet devices like computers and their routers.

> what makes desktop computers so special?

Non-casual computing and multiple screens. ex: Work, research, editing, complex creation, engineering...

Mobile can sometimes touch those things but the core is mostly done on desktops.

A lot of people, including young people, throughout Asia don't have computers. A large number of working adults our age (however old you may be) don't touch desktop or laptop computers at all on their day to day. A huge number of people only have phones in their home and only use phones for their work. Plenty of companies also use tablets with specialized apps in places where a western company would use a PC. Finding 20-30 somethings in Asia who are educated and employed who don't know how to use a mouse isn't uncommon. I've encountered it loads of times with new employees in various offices.

From my own experience,

1. Most Chinese websites or apps don't work properly or at all in a pure IPv6 setting. They claim to be IPv6 compatible, but have a lot of problems (e.g. images not loading).

2. Most Wi-Fi networks (be it home WiFi, restaurant WiFi, hotel WiFi, school WiFi, etc.) have no IPv6 addresses. Half of the IPv6 enabled WiFi networks I've ever seen are set up by myself.

Seems to me that it's the same everywhere. It's not that there are no new IPv6 deployments, it's just that the rate of change is slow.

that's surprising to me considering the vast majority of Chinese netizens have come online way after IPv6 was determined to be the future.

Also, in a country of more than a billion people, most of whom use the internet with at least 1 device, IPv4 quickly leads to address shortages.

ipv4 already supports billions of devices with millions of addresses. china surely knows about cgnat and rfc1918

CGNAT

Reply on news.ycombinator.com