China begins running high-performance backbone of future internet facility

BEIJING, April 21 (Xinhua) -- China began running the high-performance backbone of its Future Internet Technology Infrastructure (FITI) on Tuesday.

The infrastructure will provide an advanced and open test environment for the research and design of the future internet system.

FITI was constructed by 40 Chinese universities, based on Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) technology, said professor Wu Jianping from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University. The core nodes of the high-performance backbone are distributed among the 40 universities in 35 cities across the country.

FITI aims to provide users with physical layer, data link layer, network layer, transmission layer and application layer test services. The maximum bandwidth between core nodes of the FITI backbone network is 200 Gbps. FITI seamlessly connects to the global IPv4 and IPv6 facilities.

As of April this year, China has the world's largest number of IPv6 addresses. IPv6 is a communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the internet.