China has made some significant progress in Internet protocol (IP) v6 technologies, laying good foundations to solve the problem of the lack of IP addresses and facilitate the development of the Internet, scientists and business executives said on Saturday.

The Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in Beijing it had developed some core IPv6 technologies including testing software, network monitor and control, switch gateways between IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, mobile IPv6 gateways and switch machines for IPv6 networks.

"As a national institute, we must do whatever we can to promote the development of the next generation Internet (NGI) technologies in China," said ICT Director Li Guojie.

The current IPv4 protocol has 4.3 billion IP addresses and the United States owns more than 70 percent of the address resources.

China only had 32 million addresses by the end of June. This has become a big problem for the future development of the Internet, as, in the future, everyone will need to have several addresses for devices like home appliances.

The IPv6 is a core part of the NGI network, which will provide about 160 billion times of the current address resources.

At the same time, the Chinese research organizations and businesses are also pushing for the commercialization of IPv6-related technologies.

ICT signed an agreement with China United Telecommunications Corp (China Unicom), the only Chinese telecom operator with both mobile and fixed line services.

"We will begin to provide services based on IPv6 standard and technologies in 15 cities next year," said Liu Yunjie, vice president of China Unicom.

Li's institute will become the sole partner from research organizations in that project.

He revealed that China's first urban commercial IPv6 network in Chongqing also ran into operation by China Netcom and ICT.

At the same time, ICT also joined hands with Huawei Technology to build an open laboratory and transfer technologies to the biggest telecom equipment provider in China.

It licensed its testing software Saturday to Canada-based network testing equipment firm Navtel.

ICT was expected to release the second generation of its central processing unit -- God's Son 2 -- in the middle of next year, which has a clock speed of 500 megahertz and a performance equivalent to US chip giant Intel's 1-gigahertz Pentium 4.

(China Daily December 22, 2003)