The Cyberspace Administration of China and Cyberspace Affairs Commission developed a plan for large scale IPv6 adoption over the next 5 – 10 years. They published a Notice on Accelerating IPv6 by Large-scale Deployment which was made public on July 23d 2021. The plan has 3 different stages that will span through the end of 2030.
End of 2023
The goal by end of 2023, is to implement pattern driven changes. All new home wireless routers will enable and fully support IPv6 by default. Other consumer devices will be required to bake in IPv6. Any new networks will no longer be able to use private IPv4 address space.
Potential Impact on the IPv4 Market
China has one of the largest populations in the world, and therefore uses a large percentage of the global IPv4 address space. With that said, there are likely two scenarios that can come of this government mandated single-stack IPv6 transition.
- China to have over 700 million active users on IPv6
- 200 million internet of things (IoT) devices using IPv6.
- Mobile network IPv6 traffic accounted for 50%
- Metropolitan IPv6 network traffic at around 15%.
- China to have over 800 million active users on IPv6
- 400 million internet of things (IoT) devices using IPv6
- Mobile network IPv6 traffic accounted for 70%
- Metropolitan IPv6 network traffic at around 20%.
