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How the IT community responds to the New IP initiative

A number of telecommunications companies in China acted as initiators of the potential replacement for TCP / IP. But a number of experts, including those from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), believe that this is not a good idea. We discuss opinions and possible options for implementing the protocol.


/ Unsplash / Robynne Hu

Why New IP appeared


The network model TCP / IP was developed back in 1972. During this time, it revealed many vulnerabilities, including those related to authentication. Therefore, today you can come across the opinion that TCP / IP is not suitable for working in modern conditions. This point of view is held in Huawei. Representatives of the company note that communication between individual networks (for example, satellite or private) is destabilized due to poorly compatible addressing mechanisms.

To solve the problem, the corporation - with the support of the Ministry of Industry and Informatization of China and the country's telecoms - began developing a standard that will form the basis of a new generation of network infrastructure. He was named New IP .

So far, little is known about the principles of New IP. Although the official documents disclosed by the Chinese company presented the header structure of the new IP packet.


It starts with the required Fields Indicator (FI) entry. This is a bitmap that indicates which optional fields will be encapsulated in the header. Next to FI is a bit chain with a Traffic Class, Flow Label, Payload Length, and TTL.

Next are the fields with the addresses of the sender and recipient. Unlike similar fields in IPv4 and IPv6, these will have variable lengths. For data encoding, developers propose using the Concise Binary Object Representation ( CBOR ) format . The new header also contains the optional Function ID, Metadata Index, and Metadata fields for organizing user-defined networking.

What the community thinks


It is expected that New IP will increase the speed of data transmission due to more efficient addressing and allow their direct transmission between devices on the network. According to the developers, the protocol will make it possible to effectively control drones and other devices of the Internet of things as early as 2030.

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But not everyone is so optimistic - critics of the initiative see New IP as a danger to the global Internet infrastructure. Representatives of Great Britain, Sweden and the USA have already expressed their concerns . They say the new protocol resembles the Golden Shield . Fears are associated with the fact that New IP developers propose to introduce killswitch , which allows the ability to block all packets arriving at a specific address. As a result, law enforcement agencies can optionally block access to sites for individuals. Experts are also worried that such practices may lead to centralized control over the network.

Protocol perspective


The presentation on New IP will be demonstrated at the November conference of the International Telecommunication Union, which defines the principles of interaction between networks at the global level. The Chinese corporation hopes that their decision will receive ITU approval and become a generally accepted standard.

What decision the commission will make is not yet clear. Huawei may not be supported by U.S. representatives, as many U.S. IT companies have broken ties with Chinese partners. Also , one of the members of the ITU Swedish delegation, Patrik Fältström, who is called the “father of the Internet” in Europe, spoke out against New IP . According to him, the main advantage of the modern worldwide network is “openness”, and a new puncture can put this feature at risk.


/ Unsplash / Dominik Vanyi

On the other hand, the Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union is Zhou Houlin, who was nominated with the support of the Ministry of Industry and Informatization of China. This fact can have a major impact on how the New IP discussion will evolve. In any case, no matter how the fate of the new Internet protocol at ITU develops, China plans to build an Internet infrastructure without the approval of an international organization. The first tests will have to pass in 2021.

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