Back in 2004, there was a great deal of fanfare about the early adoption of IPv6 by China. The Chinese Education and Research Network Information Center (CERNIC) was at the center of IPv6 adoption efforts and created CERNET2. CERNET2 provides IPv6 services to 25 universities in 20 cities in China.[1] CERNET2 received a fair amount of press at the time with some arguing that this early embrace of the new protocol could lead to a competitive economic advantage. These views were reinforced by Chinese officials who identified the nature and importance of the problem. Zhao Houlin, Director of the International Telecommunications Union noted, "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." His colleague Jiang Linta, Chief Engineer of the China Academy of Telecommunications Research, came to an even more stark conclusion "We cannot survive without IPv6."[2] Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the protocol, apparently they stopped with CERNET2. On September 23, 2008 the China Internet Network Information Center sounded an alarm that they only had roughly 830 more days worth of IPv4 address resources at current growth rates. As ChinaTechNews.Com reported "Li Kai, director in charge of the IP business for CNNIC's international department, says that if a netizen wants to get access to the Internet, an IP address will be necessary to analyze the domain name and view the pages. At present, most of the networks in China use IPv4 addresses. As a basic resource for the Internet, the IPv4 addresses are limited and 80% of the final allocation IP addresses have been used. By the current allocation speed, China's IPv4 address resource can only meet the demand of 830 more days. If there is no available new resource by then, new netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet and the business expansion of network operators will be impossible. Li says that a new IPv6 network address, which is a basic network resource without these limitations, has been developed in America, but this kind of IP address is only used among educational websites in China."[3] China currently has only 27 blocks of registered IPv6 addresses, far less then many smaller nations in the world and ranks 14th on the global list of adopters.[4] Current effort, according to the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission, are focused on trying to get 500,000 trial users of IPv6 by 2010.[5] It will be interesting to watch the expedited transition made by the Chinese in the next two years to IPv6 as they face the ever decreasing viability of IPv4. It is important to note that the events playing out in China will play out in other countries, they are simply occurring here first due to the number of devices they want to make Internet aware.