IPv6 in China

In 2017, Xinhua reported that there would be 200 million IPv6 users in Mainland China by the end of this year. As of mid-year, a rapid growth in IPv6 users and traffic originating from Mainland China has been observed. The need for IPv6 is driven by the fact that IPv4 address pools have been exhausted, making it difficult to provide an IP address to each subscriber's device, especially in large networks like China Mobile with over 900 million mobile subscribers and 670 million 4G/LTE subscribers. To solve the addressability of clients, many networks use Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) or NAT64, which allows IPv6 addresses to be given to subscribers but then translated to IPv4 addresses. On June 7th, China Mobile started announcing IPv6 address blocks to the internet and has seen a significant increase in IPv6 usage since then.