Re: IETF: SixXS is shutting down

["Song Linjian (Davey)" <[e-mail]>]

> what's strange is the story ~10yrs back (more actually) that 'all isps in china are ipv6 enabled' isn't really true, I guess?
> sad :( 


Major ISPs are IPv6 enabled in the aspect of the backbone, not the last mile to users. Some of them deployed IPv6 island that is not connected to the backbone. 

There are two cases I experienced last year : 

1) China mobile is provisioning IPv6 to their users in Beijing over VoLTE, so I can receive IPv6 address in my handset. But I can not ping out (out of China).  

2) The ISP in Fujian province, they deployed IPv6 to the local network. We once setup IPv6-only DNS servers there but we can not pull the zone from the master server in my lab in Beijing.

Now the business of Chinese telcos are impacted by the Internet company, so they are not motivated to move forward and increase the investment in IPv6. The main force of IPv6 guys I know well are from the research department , not from the operational department of these telcos. The later has more voice in decision making from my impression.

CERNET2 is good but the example is not copied to other ISPs. IMHO academic guys spent too much effort on transition protocols and tools as a reward to intellectual challenges. few of them are really deployed in scale. Instead, too many IPv6 transition choices make IPv6 adoption harder for telcos operational people who think IPv6 is not ready for productional network. Even in the research area, there are different voice/noise  to hold back the IPv6 development, like SDN, non-ip solutions, even IPv9 (the freak!!!). 

In policy making layer, there exists some fears and exaggerating opinions with non-trivial group of advocates who try to convince Gov't that IPv6 may introduce new threats and impacts to current censorship,like IPsec, even the fact that IPsec traffic is poor.

In general, there are many challenges for IPv6 guys in China as far as I can tell. More consensus should be reached in the community to take real actions. The good news is that the global IPv6 traffic is reaching 18% of total which exerts pressures on both industry and Gov't. In most Chinese people‘s mind, it seems acceptable that China fall little behind U.S or EU in many areas, but not India and Vietnam.  More IPv6 stories of those countries and regions can really help by hurting the proud : ) 

 I’m expecting to see changes in the coming years. 

------------------------------
Davey Song(宋林健)
BII Lab
[e-mail]