Huawei has received 2,596,148,429,267,413,814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses at its disposal—more than 2.5 decillion (one decillion is 1033). The Asian Internet registrar Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) allocated this amount to the Chinese tech giant, The Register reports.
This is something of a record for APNIC. To meet Huawei’s needs, the registrar turned to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which controls the distribution of addresses around the world. To satisfy the request, APNIC requested a second /12 block. It consists of over 83 decillion addresses. However, Huawei accounts for only a subset – block /17. In total, IPv6 space accommodates more than 340 undecillion addresses (340∙1036), but many are reserved or cannot be used for various reasons.
Although the number of addresses allocated to Huawei looks incredibly large, it is practically lost in the total address space. Of course, the company is unlikely to ever have such a number of devices to connect to. However, even if not all of the total will be used, we can assume that the company has big plans. According to APNIC, Huawei intends to use dedicated IPv6 for “global implementation of cloud services and CDN.”
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China is now actively promoting the use of Internet of Things devices. A couple of billion of them are already operational, and in the coming years their number should grow to 30 billion. Huawei Cloud manages 33 cloud regions, so it has a lot of physical devices and virtual machines at its disposal. However, the company’s available targeted resources are now more than enough to cover its needs. In fact, even if every Internet device on Earth received an IPv6 address, Huawei would not be able to spend even a fraction of its incredible resources.
It is noteworthy that just in November, the chief scientist of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Center), Geoff Huston, said that the prospects for switching to the IPv6 protocol are not particularly attractive due to the changing structure of the network. According to the expert, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will not provide fundamentally new functionality. However, some still stock up on addresses. Thus, in October last year, the American registrar ARIN allocated block 2630::/16 to Capital One bank. The bank received twice as many addresses as Huawei, The Register notes.