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China Lights Pure IPv6 Network 236

Posted by timothy from the bite-the-wax-tadpole dept.
plui writes "An all IPv6 backbone was launched this weekend in China. 'CERNET2 is the biggest next-generation Internet network in operation in the world and connects 25 universities in 20 cities. The speed in the backbone network reaches 2.5 to 10 gigabits per second and connects the universities at a speed of 1 to 10 gigabits per second.' Here is a link to the story in the English version of China Daily, the online news site in People's Republic of China."
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China Lights Pure IPv6 Network More

China Lights Pure IPv6 Network

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  • IPv6 is good. Speed is good. What about ... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    content filtering?

    Let us remember China filters websites, emails and SMS. Internet is all about freedom, don't forget it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:IPv6 is good. Speed is good. What about ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rokzy ( 687636 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @06:58AM (#11190394)
      internet is about freedom? what the fuck bullshit are you talking?

      did "the owner of the internet" have a press release I missed on "what it's all about"?

      as far as I can tell it's primarily about information and communication, and more recently secondary aims like commerce.

      should you have the "freedom" the post information or conduct communications that would be illegal in another medium? no, of course not.

      or am I taking your "think of the childen" whining too seriously? was I just supposed to think about freedom, wave a tear from my eye and salute the American flag?
      • did "the owner of the internet" have a press release I missed on "what it's all about"?

        Why, yes I did.
        - - Al Gore
  • [i]"We were a learner and follower in the development of the first generation Internet, but we have caught up with world's leaders in the next-generation Internet, become a first mover, and[b] won respect and attention from the international community[/b]," said Wu Jianping, director of the expert committee of the China Education and Research Network"[/i] is he referring to us or some other beaucrats?

  • Cool... (Score:4, Funny)

    by b374 ( 799492 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @06:39AM (#11190347)
    ... now they can assign an IP for each one of them... next step: switch ID cards to IP cards ;)

  • Will the asian networks become isolated? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by riflemann ( 190895 ) <riflemann AT bb DOT cactii DOT net> on Monday December 27, 2004 @06:41AM (#11190350)
    With all of the advances going on in Asia with regards to IPv6, is this going to result in a large split in the internet as more sites appear on possibly ipv6-only servers?

    Most of Europe and the US is seriously falling behind with IPv6, and there's still very little incentive to improve this - chicken and egg indeed. My employer is a large telecom with 1 million ADSL subscribers, but has no concrete plans to roll out IPv6 still, as they see no pressing business need for it. But I fear this will isolate us from the huge economy in asia.

    There will soon be a time where there will be a lot if great content on servers that are only IPv6 capable, and these may slowly develop into separate 'internets'. What can be done for the rest of the world (ie, Europe and the US) to catch up on this? We may end up being left behind as asia powers ahead with technology.

    But then again, Asia is where most of the newer tech goodies come from, so hopefully we will start seeing more everyday appliances supporting IPv6 natively, which could be the boost we need for full v6 support in the infrastructure.

    • Re:Will the asian networks become isolated? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by eric76 ( 679787 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @06:51AM (#11190373)
      A few months ago, I asked a representative from Southwestern Bell when they would be ready to switch to IPv6. They indicated that they weren't even pursuing the issue.

      I look forward to IPv6 just because it will kill the random port scanning by all the Windoze worms.

      If we had already moved to IPv6, Code Red might still be looking for the second computer to infect.
      • I look forward to IPv6 just because it will kill the random port scanning by all the Windoze worms.

        I like IPv4 for the relative anonymity afforded by DHCP and NAT. All the kludgy hacks that made IPv4 scale actually made it better for life on the WWW.

    • Re:Will the asian networks become isolated? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jbb999 ( 758019 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @07:46AM (#11190513)
      Oops forgot to login for my comment. You could always vote with your credit card and change to an ISP which does support ipv6. They do exist. The ISP I use supports ipv6 (it's in the UK though so no use to most people here I suppose). The point is that ISPs supporting ipv6 do exist and is a unique selling point for those ISPs. It's of limited use at the moment but I suspect soon enough it will be become more use and those few isps and their customers who do support it now will have a great headstart,
    • Well, there are already several 6-to-4 and 4-to-6 gateway sites. This one is one example [sixxs.net]. If there was a site that was only accessable through IPv6 you could use a service like that to access it over any IPv4 host.

      Also, if you have an IPv6-capable host you can use a tunnel broker (such as Hurricane Electric's free service [tunnelbroker.net]) to achieve connectivity to IPv6 sites over IPv4.

      So you really don't need an IPv6-capable ISP to access IPv6 hosts, although it's cleaner that way of course.

  • Google, wake up! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zcougar ( 123972 )
    Can't wait when Google will be available from my IPv6-only network.. ;-(

  • That is a set back (Score:1, Insightful)

    by bjoeg ( 629707 )
    Well, I'm still learning on IPv4 but following previous /. story [slashdot.org] then IPv6 is a set back for China since they already adapted IPv9 to their network.
  • Though they have mentioned the huge bandwidth numbers, the main reason they have stated for IPv6 conversion is the shortage of IP Addresses.

    When IPv4 was rolled out, we thought those IP Addresses will be enough for our lifetime. Now lets see for long these IPv6 Addresses last.

    I hope it does not turn out to be Bill Gates famous joke about 640KB will be enough for everybody.
    • >When IPv4 was rolled out, we thought those IP Addresses will be enough for our lifetime. Now lets see for long these IPv6 Addresses last.

      yes but isn't there some statistic that says for IPv6 there's [some obscene number] of addresses per square metre of the Earth's surface, suggesting this really ought to be enough?
      • We will outgrow them though. What happens when we move beyond the earth? Or when someone invents devices that need lots and lots of addresses (they will happen if the addresses are available). Suggesting a finite number, any finite number, of addresses will be sufficient is silly.
        • I feel comfortable with saying that humans will no longer be human when we run out of IPv6 addresses. Other folk have posted the numbers. They are very big numbers.

          That said, unwise allocation of those addresses could change that, like the fact that MIT has more IPv4 addresses than Japan.....

        • What happens when we move beyond the earth?

          The number of people who could live in Earth orbit (including the moon) in the near future is rather limited; I'd worry more about extra growth on Earth. The whole system needs reworking to handle sites on Mars and elsewhere, which have several minute long latencies; quite likely there will be seperate address systems on each side and a limited bridge, rather than a complete redesign of Internet systems. Or maybe there will be a complete redesign of systems, and

    • Re:Shortage of IP Address (Score:5, Informative)

      by kyrre ( 197103 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @07:33AM (#11190476)
      From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

      ". IPv6 is intended to replace the previous standard, IPv4, which only supports up to about 4 billion (4 × 109) addresses, whereas IPv6 supports up to about 3.4 × 1038 (3.4 dodecillion) addresses. This is the equivalent of 4.3 × 1020 addresses per inch (6.7 × 1017 addresses/mm) of the Earth's surface."

      It should hold for a little while.

      It's enough addresses for many trillions of addresses to be assigned to every human being on the planet.

      The earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

      If we had been assigning IPv6 addresses at a rate of 1 billion per second since the earth was formed, we would have by now used up less than one trillionth of the address space.


      From tcpipguide [tcpipguide.com]

      • If we had been assigning IPv6 addresses at a rate of 1 billion per second since the earth was formed, we would have by now used up less than one trillionth of the address space.

        Yes, but what about those grandfather policies that grants 1/2 the IP range to education usage and 1/4 to be assigned among 20 multinatial companies?

        Those are the "problems" with IP4. Most of the global population isn't in the US, but most of the IP4 address ranges are. I can easily see most of the IP6 address ranges assigned to e
      • So what your saying is that my Favorites list is going to grow?
      • Why is IPv6's 128 bit address space the only feature that ever gets talked about on Slashdot? I've always thought that v6 had two killer features neither of which are the 3.4028*10^38 addresses. I'm talking about native support for encryption (IPSEC) and multicast. In my opinion these two features especially multicast have the potential to radically change the way we use the Internet.

        Only talking about IPv6's address space is like saying that the only improvement in AMD's Opteron is the 64 bit core. Wh
    • Given the IPv6 address space of 2^128 different addresses, this equates to roughly 10^38 different addresses. The IPv4 range is restricted to 4 billion, so of order 10^9 addresses, so nearly enough to give every person on earth a single IP address. This turns out to be too little, so let's just assign every person on earth 4 billion addresses (so every person on earth gets an entire IPv4 range to play with), and let's say we cater for of the order 10^10, 10^11 (10-100 billion) people. This figure easily inc
      • IPv4 was intended and assigned for networking big supercomputers, now every single PC got an IP address and every cellphone is going to need one. IPv6 is intended to solve this problem but from all the discussion going on it seems that they have not yet considered the future need of space colonies.
        • Space colonies is easy: They'll simply break the flat namespace again by introducing Intergalactic NATs.
      • I will try to explain how we are going to "waste" the IPv6 address space:
        • The shortage of GUAs (Global Unicast Addresses) is only half of the problem. The other part is route fragmentation. The defaultless routers (Those routers that route your packets safely through the backbone mesh) have a routing table of about 60.000 routing entries. It is a bit like fragmentation of a 96% full harddisk. The shortage is not only limiting you on placing new files, but it is also causing the file system to be inefficien
  • This will bring a sense of urgency to US and the rest world to roll out the next generation internet, and every human and every kitchen shall get its own IP address.

  • Connecting to IPv6 from behind home router? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nice, yet another backbone that supports IPv6.

    The only question is how to connect to an IPv6 network from behind a NAT based router. Connecting straight to the internet without the router I am able to establish a 6to4 tunnel no problem, but with the router in the way it is not possible. I am using a Linksys Gateway/Router.
    • For now - turn an old crappy computer into a FreeBSD-based router. Later - buy your router/firewall meant for the Asian market, where IPv6 will have more support. Eventually, you will be able to buy the equivalent from the corpse of a company like Linksys, which at that point will be a backwater division of an Asian company, or else buy something from a "major American corporation" that will spy on you, incur monthly charges, and be riddled with viruses (though you'll still be able to gin something up with

  • I hope they have enough content! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27, 2004 @07:32AM (#11190473)
    The speed in the backbone network reaches 2.5 to 10 gigabits per second and connects the universities at a speed of 1 to 10 gigabits per second.

    Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a high speed network if you are unable to speak your mind?
    • > what good is a high speed network if you are unable to speak your mind?

      Where can you speak your mind? Certainly not in the US.
      • Where can you speak your mind? Certainly not in the US.

        Come now, that is a bit much. The U.S. has tons of problems, no doubt, but I wouldn't say that censorship is top of the list. You can speak your mind all you like... there certainly are areas of debate, such as the recent FCC clampdowns, but overall I don't think there is any truly evil censorship going on.

        The way I see it, our problem (the current administration, the current direction and priorities of our country, etc) is something entirely else

  • Beneficial for adoption of IPv6 ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Diabolical ( 2110 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @07:39AM (#11190497) Homepage
    From the article: One big benefit of the IPv6 is to solve the problem of shortage of IP addresses. In the current Internet based on IPv4 technology, the United States controls 74 per cent of 4 billion IP addresses, while the amount that China has is only equal to a campus of the University of California, despite its 80 million Internet users.

    Although people think that with NAT all IPv4 related problems could be solved here we see a very good reason why the rest of the world could use IPv6. Most of the IPv4 ranges are in the US. The rest of the world just has to get by with whatever is left (Big companies gobbling up entire classes of IP ranges which they never really use should be obliged to gives those ranges back so others can use them).

    Would this step be beneficial to the transition to IPv6? With the advent of the internet in other countries then the western world it could well be that things need to be sped up so that we will not see different internets. Has anyone done some real research on this subject? I know i keep hearing that with NAT and similar technologies IPv6 might not be necessary but is that really so given the rise of internet usage in Asia and other countries?
    • NAT doesn't solve all IPv4 related problems. It makes is possible that your second computer doesn't need another IP address and for that we don't really need IPv6.

      But IPv6 solves a bigger problem, namely that routing tables of the core internet routers (those which don't have a default route) are really getting too big with IPv4. With IPv6 the number of routes can be an order of mangitude smaller.
      • It makes is possible that your second computer doesn't need another IP address and for that we don't really need IPv6.

        Why do we give out all those IP address classes to companies while it isn't even necessary to do so?
        We could stop worrying about any form of shortage if we make proper use of the technologies. Give a company only a small set of IP addresses for publicly available services (ftp/mail/web etc.) and let them use private class ranges for internal usage behind a NAT capable router/firewall/whate
    • (Big companies gobbling up entire classes of IP ranges which they never really use should be obliged to gives those ranges back so others can use them)

      Its not that easy. If I have 65 computers that need static IP's, I will need to buy at least 128 addresses. I cannot simply "give back" the unused IP's. Doing so would split a a subnet mask, and create a global routing nightmare.

      With the advent of the internet in other countries then the western world it could well be that things need to be sped up so
  • our new Chinese overlords

    Is it funny when it's true?
  • Here is a link to the story in the English version of China Daily, the online news site in People's Republic of China.

    Might be more accurate to say "an" online news site. There is of course People's Daily [peopledaily.com.cn], Xinhua Net [xinhuanet.com], etc. etc. etc.

    Seeing China as this huge, backward giant with one, monolithic information source is so 1978. I mean, really, this story alone surely debunks that simplistic, wrongheaded, sadly common view...

    • No no no! China censors their population! I know this become there was a story about it! I didn't actually read the story, but from other people's comments chinese citizens have no idea what is going on in the world because the government has an Agent always standing in the room a computer is in use in making sure the chinese person never ever reads anything that would be counter to the governments opinions.

      And I got all that information from a very intelligent slashdot reader who has obviously never hi
  • Five years ago when I worked for a major backbone provider (Qwest Comm.) and as I was talking to one of the global network engineers, he was wearing a shirt that had a Qwest logo and an IPv6 network under it. I asked him if that was for Qwest's IPv6 netblock and he indicated yes. We talked for about 15 minutes during which time he explained that Qwest, along with others like MCI/Worldcomm and AT&T (and several other big names you'd recognize if I cared enough to list them all), had a "parallel" IPv6 n
  • any relation to CERN??

  • Usage statistics: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @10:33AM (#11191439) Homepage
    The network hit full capacity less than 48 hours after coming online. Analysis reveals:

    53% of traffic was bittorrent
    38% of all traffic was spam.
    31% of traffic was porn.
    22% of traffic was due to windows viruses and spyware.
    17% of traffic was first-person shooter games.
    13% of traffic was VoIP.
    8% of traffic was Slashdot-related.
    3% were Last Pages of the internet. [google.com]
    0.13549% of traffic was scientific data.

    Note that Spam is 46% of all e-mail traffic and bittorrent is 43% of all P2P traffic.

    -
  • As far as I understand it, the idea that there is a shortage of IPv4 addresses is really a myth. I read a paper that someone wrote that came to the conclusion that even with the current growth rate (exponential) that we would not run out of addresses for another 20 years or so.

    I think the real problem is that these days the RIRs (such as ARIN [arin.net] and APNIC [apnic.net]) require justification before allocating netblocks. That means you have to show either current usage need or plans for future expansion, or both. You can

    • In case you haven't noticed, China has roughly the equivalent of 3.2 Class A's assigned to it. Let's put this in proportion for a moment. According to IANA [iana.org] the IBM (009/8), DEC(016/8), MIT (018/8), and the US Postal Service (056/8) collectively hold more address space than China.

      Why does the US Postal service require more than 1/4 of China's address space? More importantly, will they give it up when the time comes that the rest of the world needs it?

      While we might not run out of address space for 20 yea

      • You can't possibly compare those legacy /8 allocations from the primordial days of the internet to todays modern allocation procedures. If today any of those organizations asked for /8s they would be laughed at. Apples and freeking oranges. The fact that the US has an astronomical amount of IP space allocated to it is due to the fact that most of those huge chunks were allocated way back in the early days of classful routing, before CIDR and aggregation. These days if you are in the US and you request n
    • I think we should move to IPv6 for many reasons, but one is to simply destroy all reasonable arguments about ipv4 addresses. Yes, with NAT and other technologies, we may very well be able to live on the v4 addresses. But why should we 'get by' with 32 bit addresses when 128 bit addresses not only solve any nagging issues of the limited ammount of remaining addresses, but also introduces mandatory security (ipsec) gives us almost unimaginable option into how to split up addresses(each sovereign nation could
    • To the person that modded this Flamebait, I was not trying to be racist or anything. I was trying to point out that the "IPv4 space scarcity" is a myth, and that with todays current allocation procedures a US company faces the same documentation and justification guidelines that a Chinese company faces. The only reason that the US has so many more allocations is because back in the 80s when the internet was small /8s were handed out to companies that asked for it, and most of them were US companies or gov
  • Anyone have the IPs so I can put them in my blacklist?

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