ISC and APNIC Install The First Root Nameserver in China

Redwood City, CA -- ISC (ISC) has installed a new F-root server anycast instance in Beijing in cooperation with APNIC, China Telecom and the Beijing Internet Exchange which is run by China Netcom Corporation (CNC). The new server is a mirror of the F-root nameserver managed by ISC in the United States.

Despite being the world's most populous country, China has never enjoyed the benefits of a local root nameserver, and this development will bring dramatic improvements in speed and reliability to Internet users in Beijing, China and the surrounding region.

According to Paul Wilson, Director General of APNIC, this is one of the most important Internet infrastructure developments in the Asia Pacific region, in recent years. "APNIC is now allocating more IP addresses to China than to any other country, and this rate of growth will continue for many years. This rootserver deployment will support that growth and benefit the Chinese Internet community, and I am very glad of APNIC's role in such an important development."

Joao Damas, ISC Senior Programme Manager, added, "China is the world's most populated country and we are excited to be working with APNIC supporting the development of the Internet in China with the deployment of this root nameserver. With this installation, ISC has added 13 new F-root mirror nameservers in 2003."

The new server will store a series of information for identifying domain names that are included at the end of web addresses, for example '.' or '.com'. This enables it to find sites immediately in the region or to direct users to the other relevant servers located in other countries. For example, users in Beijing and the surrounding region have noticed a fifteen-fold improvement in response time. In addition, the new server will also decrease the country's dependency on foreign Internet connectivity.

About APNIC

APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, is one of four regional Internet registries in the world, responsible for allocation and registration of IP addresses in the Asia Pacific region. APNIC is a not-for-profit membership organization, whose members determine the policies and direction of the organization through open self-regulatory processes.

For more information contact Paul Wilson, Director General, at dg@apnic.net or visit www.apnic.net.

About ISC

ISC was founded in 1993 to develop and publish high quality reference implementations of core Internet protocols including DNS and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). ISC operates one of the 13 root DNS servers as a public service to the Internet. ISC has operated F.root-servers.net for IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) since 1993. F-root answers more than 272 million DNS queries per day, making it one of the busiest DNS servers in the world.

F-root is a virtual server made up of multiple systems and runs ISC BIND 9 as its DNS server. ISC's DNS implementation, called BIND, was originally developed at UC Berkeley as part of the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) system, and has subsequently been completely rewritten at ISC. Most DNS servers on the Internet run BIND or BIND-derived software. ISC's reference implementation of DHCP is the de facto standard for all UNIX and UNIX-like systems including Linux and BSD.

For more information contact Joao Damas, ISC Senior Programme Manager, at Joao_Damas@isc.org or visit www.isc.org.

Media Contact: Carol Nash, ISC, 408-859-4537, carol_nash@isc.org