Technology & Internet Infrastructure

China's IPv6 Active Users Reach 869 Million – A Decade of Internet Infrastructure Evolution

The China IPv6 Development Report (2026) reveals that 77.38% of Chinese internet users are now on IPv6, with mobile networks leading the transition. The shift from dual-stack coexistence to IPv6-only architecture is now underway.

• IPv6 active users in China reached 869 million by end of 2025, a 88.22% increase since the 14th Five-Year Plan period began.
• Mobile network IPv6 traffic share hit 70.85%, while fixed network IPv6 traffic reached 32.38% — both have grown exponentially since 2021.
• China holds 68,573 /32 IPv6 address blocks (13.97% of global allocation), ranking second worldwide.
• The 15th Five-Year Plan for IPv6 (2026–2030) focuses on deep integration with 6G, AI, computing networks, and satellite internet.

On July 28, 2026, the China IPv6 Development Report (2026) was released at the 5th China IPv6 Innovation and Development Conference. The report documents a transformation that has fundamentally reshaped the country's internet infrastructure over the past five years.

IPv6, the successor to the decades-old IPv4 protocol, was designed to solve the problem of address exhaustion. Every device connected to the internet needs a unique IP address, and IPv4 — with its roughly 4.3 billion addresses — ran out years ago. IPv6 provides an almost inexhaustible supply (340 undecillion addresses), enabling the kind of device-to-device connectivity that underpins the Internet of Things, smart cities, and autonomous systems.

What makes China's IPv6 adoption notable is the scale and the speed of the transition. Between 2021 and 2025, mobile network IPv6 traffic surged by 311.68%, and fixed network IPv6 traffic grew by 714.01%. By June 2026, IPv6 already accounted for 34.55% of total national network traffic, up from 33.79% at the end of 2025. Mobile networks have been the primary driver: 7 out of every 10 bytes of mobile data now travel over IPv6.

The report shows that all eight key performance indicators set in the 14th Five-Year Plan were exceeded. IPv6 has moved from a phase of "quantitative accumulation" to a "qualitative leap." The next phase, outlined in the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), envisions IPv6 as the foundational layer for emerging technologies: 6G mobile networks, artificial intelligence, computing power networks, and satellite internet.

This transition also carries important implications for cybersecurity. IPv6's built-in IPsec encryption, larger address space (which makes network scanning attacks less effective), and mandatory support for secure neighbor discovery all contribute to a more resilient network architecture — though the new protocol also introduces attack surfaces that security teams must learn to defend.

For ordinary internet users, the shift to IPv6 is largely invisible: most devices and operating systems have supported IPv6 for years, and the transition happens automatically in the background. But the infrastructure beneath the surface is changing fundamentally, and China's experience offers a case study in how a large country can manage a protocol migration that touches every connected device.