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.

The predicted 830 days means there are enough IPv4 addresses to last until January 1, 2011, a nice, round date. This end date for the IPv4 supply is a good deal sooner than the one predicted by the scripts written by APNIC's Geoff Huston, which currently list November 2, 2010 as the date the IANA global pool is going to run out. This pool currently holds 654 million addresses, but there are also 325 million unused addresses hidden in nooks and crannies and held by the five Regional Internet Registries that handle address distribution in various parts of the world. They use very similar rules, so all ISPs throughout the world have equal access to address space—but this may or may not translate into equal access for their users.

Those additional 325 million addresses would be used up a year later according to Huston's calculations, on November 1, 2011, ten months after Kai's predicted end date. With a total of 979 million addresses, we'd have to use up 1.18 million (Kai) or 0.86 million (Huston) a day. The most address-use-heavy month in the past decade was this February, with 920,000 addresses a day, but half the months from 2007 until now have seen an average of under 500,000 addresses a day. So yes, the end is near for the IPv4 address supply, but probably not that near.

In the past, there have been stories about how China had fewer addresses than MIT or Stanford. This was true until around 2002. China started that year with some 13 million addresses in use and ended it with 22 million. MIT has, and Stanford had, a block of 16.78 million addresses, given out long ago when PCs still ran 16-bit software, and 32 bits seemed like a lot. However, China has more than made up for a slow start address-wise, and recently passed Japan as the second-largest holder of IPv4 addresses, with 167 million addresses as of this week. The US has 1.44 billion. China is now also the largest user of new addresses, with nearly 32 million addresses put into use this year, compared to the US's 27 million, with Japan and Korea each using some 7 million, and Germany and Italy 6 million.

On the other hand, I personally have 281,474,976,710,656 IPv6 addresses.