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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

China's IPv6 transition is 74% complete.[1] Conversion to IPv6 was specifically called out in China's 14th Five Year Plan, which gives the goal high visibility within the government and the Party. Conversion is quite far along. The current goal is everything IPv6 enabled by 2025, IPv4 turns off in 2030.

99% of the top 100 mobile applications in China are on IPv6. China Mobile's backbone is now IPv6 only.

[1] https://www.china-ipv6.cn/#/

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India is also around 75%. Both of them cover quite a bit of humanity. The regions where growth is going to happen don't own a lot of blocks so they will focus on IPv6.

Vietnam (pop. 98M) has mandated moving to IPv6, with goals for migration between 2025 and 2030:

* https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/14/vietnam_digital_infra...

Meanwhile in Australia I called my ISP to enable IPv6 and they asked me to justify why I needed it.

Because "it's the Internet" and has been a standard since the year 2000 doesn't seem to be sufficient reason to bother...

Some of the larger Danish ISP has explained that they do not offer IPv6, because there's no demand. I very much doubt that they have any demand for IPv4 either, because most people don't know and don't care how the internet is delivered to them.

If it's NBN, Aussie Broadband and Superloop/Exetel have good IPv6 support with prefix delegation giving you a /56.

I'm on Aussie Broadband, but the building is with OptiComm -- a company that decided that their business model is lock-in contracts with the apartment builders and price-gouging of customers.

Yup, I have a /56 delegated. Now if I only had something at home that needs to be world accessible...

"I'm a software developer and I need it to do my job."

Even if it's not strictly true, that seems like a solid justification. Though obviously that won't work for the general public.

That is a wild response to give a customer. I'm surprised they are still in business if that's how they treat fairly reasonable customer requests.

Yeah, a normal ISP would just say "we don't have it".

What ISP is that? Name and shame. I'm Australian and want to know to avoid them.

OptiComm

You can't avoid them because they're not a retail telco, they provide wholesale/bulk services to apartment buildings with 15-year lock in contracts.

The IPv6 transition is a side effect of China building their own internal "internet" from the ground up that will not be connected to what we think of as the internet. "Turning off IPv4" is code for shutting off the DFZ and users only being able to reach other networks within the country.

We should absolutely not be pointing to this as a success or a model for other countries.

I don't think they need IPv6 to cut off everyone from the internet (if that were their plan). They can do the same with just IPv4.

What? You can still connect to worldwide IPv6 endpoints in China -- some endpoints are censored, just the same as how the IPv4 firewall is accomplished.

You are describing as if the IPv6 network within China is completely blocked off from the wider network. It's not.

US Dept. of Commerce mandates the same:

https://www.commerce.gov/about/policies/ipv6-policy

Collective action by people willing to listen to experts is needed to achieve positive infrastructure results. Infrastructure being a precept to growth, I would not be surprised if our inability to do this leads to the West's current global position becoming greatly diminished.

This is yet another way they're ahead relative to the US.

When you want to control and censor all internet is much easier todo that only with ipv6 and not care for ipv4, not sure if that's a "step ahead"

IPV4 internet is so broken in terms of surveillance you might as well just get a satellite uplink or some sort of out-of-band channel if you're in china.

v6 is just as easy to censor as v4. Given the popularity of Veitnamese pho noodles over there, I don't think internet censorship is as important an objective as you estimate. Have you noticed how many Chinese tourists there are around the world? Not much you can do about internet when any of them could just pick up a newspaper.

My impression is that the Chinese government doesn’t care about a few people being able to access blocked content. What they want to do is prevent large social movements from forming via the mainstream internet.

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