Given that China will have almost twice as many broadband users as the United States by the end of 2007, the sense of injustice among China’s Internet officials is palpable. "When 26 Chinese share one Internet protocol address, while each American possesses six IP addresses…this is the quandary facing China in the IPv4 era," Zhao Houlin, director of the International Telecommunications Union, said in 2005. The bottom line for China, says Jiang Lintao, chief engineer at the China Academy of Telecommunications Research, is that "We cannot survive without IPv6."

The Leapfrog Effect

Latif Ladid, organizer of the IPv6 Global Summit, the world’s largest IPv6 conference, recalls being unable to order a drink at a caf¿nside the Beijing International Convention Center when the conference was first held there in 2004. In April 2006, sitting at the same caf¿the conference humming 100 feet away, he had no problem. "Now everyone speaks English," he says.

And that’s just the beginning of China’s accommodations to the West.

A bellhop at one of the conference hotels has adopted a Western alias, Harrison, to save foreign guests the trouble of having to decipher and pronounce his real name. A Chinese technology PR woman changed her Western pseudonym from Daisy to Edelweiss when she realized she had misidentified her favorite flower and finally settled on Dandelion after surmising that Edelweiss was too hard to pronounce.

It’s all part of China’s plan to integrate with—and compete against—the West, says Ladid, pointing to the 2,000-plus Chinese engineers on hand at the conference to learn about IPv6. They are the soldiers in the battle for the next Internet, the ones who will build China’s new network and design the services that take advantage of it.

The innovation potential provided by IPv6 is enormous. Every device, from cell phones, to street lights, to a household thermostat, can have its own unique position on the Internet and be connected all the time. Utility companies will be able to read meters remotely over the Internet. Consumers parked outside a grocery store will be able to download shopping lists from their Internet-connected refrigerators to their BlackBerrys. Since every computer will have its own permanent IP address, users will be able to authenticate the source of e-mails or other requests, providing the means to track and prevent today’s hacking, spam and phishing schemes.

For defense strategists, IPv6 is science fiction come to life. John Stenbit, former CIO of the Department of Defense, says that every soldier, spy plane and even every bullet will eventually have its own IP address, giving the military an incredible level of real-time visibility into combat zones.