Tech boom means China will run out of IP addresses by 2011

In the West, we’re always told that we’re IPv6 laggards and that large parts of Asia are already running the new protocol. But apparently, China has some work to do before the whole country is IPv6-ready, too. Li Kai, who is director in charge of the IP business for CNNIC, has told ChinaTechNews that the current supply of IPv4 addresses will only last another 830 days. Furthermore, most network operators in China are only IPv4-capable—with the exception of educational networks. CNNIC is the China Internet Network Information Center, which handles the registration of .cn domains and also distributes IP addresses in China in cooperation with APNIC, the provider of address space in the Asia-Pacific region.

So apparently, China isn’t much further along with IPv6 deployment than Europe and North America, where the research/educational community primarily has large IPv6 networks (for instance, Internet2 and GÉANT), while most of the commercial Internet is still hampered by the limited 32-bit address space of the original IPv4 protocol.