Vietnam Plans To Convert All Its Networks To IPv6

Vietnam will convert all local networks to IPv6, under a sweeping digital infrastructure strategy announced last week.

The plan emerged in Decision No. 1132/QD-TTg – signed into existence by permanent deputy prime minister Nguyen Hoa Binh – and defines goals for 2025 and 2030.

By 2025, the nation intends to connect two new submarine cables – an important local issue. Earlier this year, internet speeds slowed when three of the five cables connecting the country broke. Also by 2025, the country wants "universal" fiber-to-the-home, 5G services in all cities and industrial zones, and work to have commenced on an unspecified number of datacenters capable of running AI applications and operating with power usage effectiveness index (PUE) of less than 1.4.

The 2030 ambitions are more significant, and include a requirement for all networks to use IPv6, universal 1Gbit/sec fiber-to-the-premises, 5G covering 99 percent of the population, and connection of another six submarine cables to provide the nation with 350TB/sec of network capacity. One of those new cables is to be state-owned.

Vietnam's population exceeds 100 million and it already has 140 mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. IPv4 with network address translation can scale to those levels – if Vietnamese carriers have secured sufficient number resources.

But many countries in the developing world were granted modest IPv4 allocations, making IPv6 a more natural option. IPv6 and beefier land and sea networks will clearly help handle the traffic those subscriptions – and terrestrial traffic – collectively generate.

The plan also calls for construction of hyperscale datacenters, AI application datacenters, edge datacenters and regional datacenters – but doesn't define their capacity.

It does call for telcos and datacenters to employ "super-large capacity, super-wide bandwidth, be universal, sustainable, green, smart, open and safe to meet the requirements of developing the digital economy, digital society, digital government, contributing to ensuring national defense and security."

To build out the server warehouses, Vietnam hopes to attract investment, both foreign and domestic.

Local businesses and governments will be encouraged to become cloud users, through what machine translation of the plan describes as "propaganda campaigns."

The day after the infrastructure decision was signed, Vietnam signed a cyber security decision that called for encouraging organizations and individuals to "rent services" from datacenters.

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Another stated 2030 goal is for each resident of Vietnam to have four IoT connections, and for 70 percent of the population to use a personal electronic signature.

These mandates follow semiconductor goals released last month, when the government decided it would elevate its semiconductor industry to an annual turnover of $100 billion by 2050, also establishing a plan to make itself a chip biz hub around this time last year. ®