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China Lights Pure IPv6 Network

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."

10 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I suddenly have this urge to move to China... by liangzai · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh, you can access porn and "subversive documents" all you want in China. I do it everyday.

  2. Re:IPv6 is good. Speed is good. What about ... by GrAfFiT · · Score: 2, Informative

    I guess you're referring to this document. Let's read it again. Why do you need to misrepresent the thoughts of the author ?

  3. Re:I suddenly have this urge to move to China... by liangzai · · Score: 5, Informative

    No proxies. It is not illegal to surf porn or stuff about Falun gong in China. What is illegal is setting up commercial porn sites within China (or dealing with commercial porn in general - your home made porn is legal). It is also illegal to challenge the ruling party, for instance by setting up Falun gong web sites within China. Everything else is legal, and if it isn't, nobody gives a shit anyway (you will find porn behind the desk in any video rental shop in China).

    75% of the kids in China learn about sex through web porn. This is in concordance with the rest of the world. Go figure.

    The Chinese authorities are very ambivalent about porn. That is why they do some obligatory censoring and let the majority sip through.

  4. Re:Shortage of IP Address by kyrre · · Score: 5, Informative
    From wikipedia:

    ". 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

  5. Re:Shortage of IP Address by NoOneInParticular · · Score: 2, Informative
    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 includes companies. This scheme will need 10^20 different IP addresses. So, we then have managed to use about 67 of the available 128 bits, or in other words a fraction of 10^-18 (2^-61) of the entire space of addresses. That's not really a lot yet. I'm pretty sure that we'll need at least a decade to figure out how we can use 4 billion addresses per person/company.

    Ok, let's do better, let's assign each cell in these 10^10 people with a single IP address. According to some source, the human body consists of 10^14 cells. Assigning one address to each cell for each person thus equates to the use of 10^24 addresses. Then, we've managed to fill up 10^-14 of the available space. Not even noticable, while we now can address any cell in anyones brain with ease.

    You can juggle the numbers in various ways (square foot of earth as another poster said), but what remains is that IPv6 address space is mindboggingly big, and save for assigning every atom on earth a unique IP-address (we would need about 170 bits for that), it should last quite a while before we find ways of wasting enough of the address space that it starts to matter. I'm pretty sure that we'll come up with ingenious ways to do this, but so far my own efforts in this respect have made puny dents in the number. Try to figure out some scheme that (a) makes sense and (b) requires so many IP-addresses that we might conceivably run out in a century or so. Try it, it's fun!

  6. Re:Beneficial for adoption of IPv6 ? by jeroendekkers · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:There is no current shortage of IPv4 addresses! by RealBorg · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's nonsense, we have already run out of IP adresses, that's why we get feature crippled 'name based virtual hosts', 'dynamic IP addresses', 'private networks with NAT',...

  8. Re:Why not us?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Research project of Tsinghua University pebble-bed reactor, and become competent. There will not be piles of waste as are produced with the foolish and wasteful reactor design using fuel rods-the technology forced upon the US by its naval administration and since carried forward in ignorance despite Oppenheimer's idea; it took China to realize that and achieve practical nuclear fission electrical power production.

  9. Not much different than Internet2 in the US by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I'm not quite sure that I agree with the assertion that this is the biggest next-generation Internet network in operation in the world. Certainly networks research and education networks, such as Eurpe's GEANT, CA*Net in Canada, and Internet2 in the US could give this network a run for its' money in size.

    This network is very similar to the Internet2's Abilene research and education network in the US. The difference is Internet2 runs routers in "dual-stack" mode, meaning they support both IPv4 and IPv6 on the same device. If you wanted to connect to Internet2's backbone using only IPv6, so could do so, but almost everyone chooses to have both IPv4 and IPv6 connections

  10. Re:Beneficial for adoption of IPv6 ? by Jahz · · Score: 2, Informative
    (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 that we will not see different internets.

    IPv6 was designed to coexist harmoniously with IPv4, otherwise it would have been laughed at. v4 packets that enter China's new network will be wrapped in a v6 packet. When they leave, they will be convereted back. There is no doubt that IPv6 adoption will be slow since it required massive infrastructure changes (lots of router upgrades/replacements). Therefore, we an expect many years of hybrid networks. When the transition phase is over, we can start moveing to IPv8 :-)

    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?

    You should definitely read up on IPv6. True, 128 bits of IP is a major bonus, but there are many other reasons v6 is better than v4 (and some that it is not). Here are some:
    • IPv6 does away with router packet fragmentation, Thus speeding up packets that travel over many networks (with different MTU's)
    • IPv6 supports quality of service (QoS). QoS allows routers to *easily* give priority to packets of a certain class. i.e. your ISP will be able to sell different plans. The higher the plan, the more priority your packets get.
    • The idea of a "flow." The allows routers to identify packets in the same connection and route them accordingly. i.e. your IP phone conversation could less jittery.
    • The checksum header is completely removed. We are at a point where the proliferation of broadband is high enough that each router should not have to checksum every packet. It takes too much time. v6 shifts the burden of identifying erroneous packets the end computer. They happen too rarely to check at each router


    As you can see, IPv6 is will make the internet faster overall. It also provides special support for streaming (flow) services, allowing for a better multimedia experience.
    --
    There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.