More on China's IPv6 Network Buildout

photojournaliste writes "China has developed and demonstrated its first high-performance network core router based on the next-generation Internet standard known as IPv6, which the country officially inaugurated earlier this week." There's also a CNet story, which has a bit more information than our earlier story.

Comments

The CNET article itself is terrible.

[James Youngman]

I cannot believe there were so many errors in an article which is only 358 words long. What a bad piece of journalism. Only 81 words are devoted to the China new item, the rest ss background on IPv6. The IPv6 information is riddled with errors.

There is a rather better article on the subject of IPV6 adoption at InternetWeek, but that article is now four years old.

As for the specific information in the article,
"IPv6 provides billions more IP addresses" - I think the reporter is a bit confused about all these large numbers. IPv6 provides billions of TIMES more addresses. More even than that in fact; 2 to the power 128 is 79228162514264337593543950336 times greater than 2 to the power 32. (This calculation was brought to you by GNU bc)

"It was created and deployed in response to ... especially as Web use in Asia rises sharply." - The author has fallen for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. In any case, the beginning of the development of IPv6 occurred significantly before the extensive takeup of Internet technologies in Asia.

As other people have already mentioned (including in the reader comments below the article - I would have contributed but see no point in "registering" with CNET), goodness knows where the journalist got their figure of "257 nodes". They should perhaps take the time to either check their notes or cross-check the information their sources are giving them.

Something the author failed to point out is that it is not only Asian countries that have been working with IPV6. There has been significant piloting in most countries that make use of the Internet. This means that there are IPV6 over IPv4 tunneling facilities that work therse days, meaning that it is not necessary for countries up upgrade everything to IPv6 in order for their businesses to trade with China, no matter what the article implies.