Chongqing- Twelve departments, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, recently issued a notice to confirm the list of 22 comprehensive pilot cities for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) technology innovation and integrated application, where Yongchuan District of Chongqing was selected as the only city in Sichuan and Chongqing region in the southwest.

What is IPv6?

IPv6 is the cornerstone of the era of the Internet of Things. It plays a key and fundamental role in constructing new infrastructure and has a profound impact on the innovation and transformation of network information technology and industrial applications.

IPv6 also serves as the most recent Internet Protocol version (IP). This communications protocol provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet.

Notably, the latest news reveals that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now offers customers the option to use IPv6 addresses in their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on new and existing RDS instances, which increases the number of available addresses severalfold and customers no longer need to manage overlapping address spaces in their VPCs.

So, how Sichuan and Chongqing can benefit from using IPv6?

Using IPv6, the Internet will be able to grow to millions of times its current size in terms of the numbers of people, devices, and objects connected to it, which provides a vastly expanded address space.

Yongchuan, as the only selected pilot in Sichuan and Chongqing, can promote the large-scale deployment and innovative application of IPv6, linking the surrounding areas to form a number of characteristic and replicable typical cases in the fields of IPv6 traffic improvement, single stack application, and industrial development, forming an IPv6 technology and application standard system to boost the information development of surrounding areas in Sichuan and Chongqing.

IPv6 technology R&D highland

Yongchuan has regional advantages in IPv6 deployment. As the residence of many regional institutions and basic telecom operators, its IPv6 user traffic, network applications, infrastructure and terminal support, and network performance are all in the first echelon of Chongqing.

Chongqing Yungu · Yongchuan Big Data Industrial Park has become the largest single big data industrial base in the city, with a total of 434 digital enterprises and 19,000 employees. Last year, the output value reached 32.6 billion yuan (approx. 4.93 billion U.S. dollars) and was approved as China's most dynamic software park.

At the same time, Yongchuan has accelerated the pilot construction of a new national smart city. For instance, smart medical treatment and smart transportation have become the city’s demonstration models, and the first L4 autonomous driving public bus line in China has been put into commercial operation.

In the future, By focusing on ten innovative projects such as IPv6 single-stack application of Yuxi Big Data Center, IPv6 application of smart networked vehicles, and IPv6 application of smart transportation, etc., Yongchuan aims to accelerate the construction of advanced and independent IPv6 technology, industry, facilities, application, and security system and form a market-driven and synergistic development pattern.

To become a national demonstration area for IPv6 development pilot, Yongchuan will build a national influential IPv6 technology R&D highland, a system innovation highland, an industrial cluster highland, and a talent gathering highland.

This is to further promote the development of the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle and the strategic cooperation between the east and west to boost the digital transformation and high-quality development of the economy and society.

(Wang Lu, as an intern, also contributed to this report.)