China aims to fully migrate to IPv6 by 2030
The Chinese government has launched a plan to promote widespread adoption of IPv6. By the end of 2023, the country aims to have 700 million active IPv6 users and by 2030 China should have a single-stack IPv6 network.
The Cyberspace Administration of China writes that it wants to accelerate the adoption of IPv6, with the agency citing various objectives for the next five years, among other things. For example, by 2023, the country must have 700 million active IPv6 users and 200 million Iot devices must use IPv6, writes the British website The Register.
Also, major domestic networks should have switched to IPv6 by then. The Chinese government also mentions ‘data centers, content distribution networks, platforms for cloud services and DNS systems. Furthermore, all new Internet routers in China must have IPv6 support enabled by default by 2023.
Two years later, by 2025, China should have 800 million active IPv6 users and the number of IoT devices with an IPv6 connection should double to 400 million, according to China’s plans. 70 percent of mobile data traffic should be over IPv6 by 2025, and all of China’s national government websites should have switched to IPv6 by that year. At least half of all active Chinese home routers should also support the protocol that year, according to the CAC.
It would then take about five years for China to fully complete the IPv6 rollout, offering a single-stack IPv6 network, the government organization claims. This means that around 2030, the Chinese network traffic would run entirely via the IPv6 stack, and that no use is made of the IPv4 protocol.
The Chinese government has been committed to the switch to IPv6 for some time. In 2017, it introduced an action plan for the adoption of IPv6. According to China, an increase in the implementation of that protocol has been observed with that plan, but the country wants to continue to commit itself through the new plans.
According to Akamai statistics, 23.3 percent of China’s internet traffic is currently over IPv6. This puts the country in 33rd place in the world.
IPv6 has several advantages over IPv4, including a greater number of available IP addresses. For example, the last available IPv4 addresses within, for example, Europe, Russia and Western Asia have already been distributed.