PART1 Chinese Government Reiterates its IPv6 Commitment
IPv6 Summit in China 2005, held in Beijing on April 4-6, 2005, impressed the participants on the strong drive by the Chinese government in implementing IPv6 for next-generation networking. PART1 of the two-part article reports on the messages by the keynote speakers.

Chinese government is known to be in the process of building the nation-wide next-generation networking infrastructure, in a project called CNGI, or China Next Generation Internet. This research project is a collaboration among virtually all ministries of the Chinese government, as well as academic organizations and private sector communication service providers.

Wu Hequan, Chair of CNGI Expert Committee, Vice President, Chinese Academy of Engineering, reiterated that the ultimate goal of CNGI project is to build Next Generation Network, with QoS and management features. He also said that the value of the communication infrastructure is in the applications and businesses it enables.


Liu Dong, CEO of BII Group, the conference host, announces the opening of the summit

At the end of last year, CERNET2, the IPv6-only version of China Education and Research Network went to full service. CERNET2 connects 20 cities in China, with maximum 2.5Gbps connections.

Wu Jianping, Professor of Tsinghua University and the director of CERNET 2, explained that NGN requires large address space, high bandwidth, scalability, reliability and end-to-end QoS. IPsec will be the key in securing communications on NGN, he said. Wu said that all the network for CNGI will be in place by the middle of 2005, and the project will focus on the applications and services in the second phase of development from 2006 to 2010.


Need for government support

IPv6 has already entered business phase in Japan, said Hiroshi Esaki, Professor of Tokyo University and Executive Chair of IPv6 Promotion Council of Japan. He told that IPv6 will gradually penetrate into various industry sectors which have not been IP-enabled, providing cost-effective and flexible, unified communication platform.

Latif Ladid, President of IPv6 Forum, pointed out that IPv6 supporters have become a powerful force influencing the world, but political good will by the governments is a crucial factor in the success of IPv6.

On the political will in Europe, Ulf Dahlsten, Director of DG INFSO at European Commission, said that EU has actively conducted R&D and implemented large scale test beds such as GEANT 2, and it will continue further IPv6 promotion efforts on dissemination, policy activities, and procurement. He pointed out that Euro Defence Agency has IPv6 enablement in its work plan.

But it’s not that IPv6 solves all the problems. Jeff Doyle, Senior Network Architect at Juniper Networks, said that with IPv6, a new end-to-end security model needs to be developed. Firewalls will need to transform themselves into security managers. Hardware packet processing is necessary for high-performance router-based filters, but IPv6 extension header makes it difficult to implement TCP port-based filters on hardware. He also pointed out the need for devising powerful IPv6 multihoming technique, to avoid the issues caused by current IPv4 multihoming practice.

IPv6 address space is not infinite, warned Zhao Houlin, Director of TSB at ITU. Late comers to IPv6 will be disadvantaged if IPv6 address space continues to be allocated on first come, first served basis in the current framework.

As for further IPv6 promotion, Jim Bound, CTO of IPv6 Forum and Chair of North American IPv6 Task Force, stressed the need for net centricity focus. The Next Generation Network, he said, calls for distributed access network, network mobility, as well as network virtualization. Bound said IPv6 promoters need to define the business and technical requirements for NGN, and work with various consortia and other bodies to satisfy them.