China syndromeChina Embraces Bigger Internet with Virtually Unlimited IP Addresses

By John Xie

Published 14 August 2020

China is pushing for the adoption of a new worldwide Internet Protocol that could make the internet bigger and faster, but also potentially less anonymous. The technology, called IPv6, is an upgrade of the internet’s architecture that would allow trillions more electronic devices to have unique addresses online.

China is pushing for the adoption of a new worldwide Internet Protocol that could make the internet bigger and faster, but also potentially less anonymous. The technology, called IPv6, is an upgrade of the internet’s architecture that would allow trillions more electronic devices to have unique addresses online.

At a global summit held in Guangdong, China, July 30-31, the country’s top internet agencies called for a new IP-only Internet. “The initiative proposed that 2020 be the first year for the global large-scale acceleration of the deployment of pure IPv6,” the state-run Xinhua news agency reported last Friday.

Designed to replace the version 4 protocol that the current internet mostly depends on, IPv6 is an upgraded version of the architecture that creates the unique “addresses” that allow computer networks around the world to communicate with one another.

A Larger and Faster Internet, but at What Cost?
As the first widely deployed Internet Protocol, IPv4 has been in use for decades. It also has been running out of space. In the 1990s as the Web rapidly grew, technologists warned that there were only about 4.3 billion addresses available, and eventually the number of online devices like PCs, smartphones, tablets, gaming systems and “smart” appliances would exceed that, preventing new devices from going online.  

By 1998, engineers came up with a proposal to rebuild the system under a new protocol. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an organization responsible for establishing internet standards, developed the new IPv6 communications protocol, which uses a 128-bit address versus IPv4’s 32-bit address, dramatically expanding the number of devices that can go online.   

There are more than enough IPv6 addresses for every piece of dust on the face of the Earth,” Wu Hequan, chairman of the Internet Society of China, told Xinhua in 2017 when the general offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council first unveiled the country’s action plan on the deployment of IPv6.  

The system also promises that by using improved routing techniques, the new internet will not only be larger, but faster. In a technical presentation at a technology conference last month, Apple shared some internal statistics in the hope of convincing app developers to adopt IPv6. “And when IPv6 is in use, the median connection setup is 1.4 times faster than IPv4,” said Jiten Mehta, internet technologies engineer at Apple.