Fundamental Resources of the Internet

In 2008, the fundamental resources of China’s internet continued to grow rapidly. Except for IPv4, resources are growing at the same speed that the number of netizens is growing or faster.

 

The growth rate of IPv4 addresses has already trailed behind the growth of netizens for two years. The average number of IPv4 addresses per person continues to decline. As a required resource for internet access, if the number of IPv4 addresses cannot be increased at a faster rate or the transition to IPv6 cannot be made, this may become a bottleneck for internet development in China.

 

There are two types of IP addresses: IPv4 and IPv6. Currently, IPv4 is the mainstream.   However, along with a greater and greater lack of IPv4 addresses, the transition to IPv6 has already started.

 

Although IPv4 resources are tight, due to the rapid development of the internet in my country, with the hard work of each IP address allocation organization, the IP address resources of my country have still maintained a fast growth rate. In 2008, there were 181,273,344 IP addresses which is 34% more than the year before. Although the growth rate of IPv4 addresses is maintaining rapid growth, it still cannot overtake the growth rate of netizens in my country. When servers, routers and other internet equipment that take up IP addresses are added to the equation, the lack of IP addresses in my country is extremely severe.

 

As of the end of 2008, the total number of domains in China reached 16,826,198 which is 41% greater than in 2007.

 

Of the increase in domains in China, most are under the .cn TLD. In 2001 domains under the .cn TLD only accounted for 16% of total domains. After a few years of development, in 2006 the .cn market already reached 43.9% but still lagged behind the number of domains under the .com TLD (which took up 47.2% of China’s domain market at that time). In 2007, China’s national registrar of .cn domain names launched the “National Domain Soar Away Plan.” In one stroke, this helped the number of .cn domain names pass the .com domain names and take up the head position of China’s domain market. At the end of 2008, .cn domains names took up 80.7% of the domain market.

	Number	Proportion
cn	13,572,326	80.66%
com	2,739,130	16.28%
net	419,220	2.49%
org	93,913	0.56%
Other	1,609	0.01%
Total	16,826,198	100.0%

 

 

	Number	Proportion
.cn	8,878,139	65.41%
.com.cn	3,629,375	26.74%
.net.cn	505,333	3.72%
.org.cn	218,703	1.61%
.adm.cn	278,336	2.05%
.gov.cn	45,555	0.34%
.ac.cn	13,438	0.10%
.mil.cn	6	0.00%
edu.cn	3,441	0.03%
Total	13,572,326	100.0%

 

Of the domains ending in .cn, the second most popular is .com.cn. In comparison with last year, second level domains ending in .cn increased by 200% but the proportion of .com.cn domain names dropped slightly.

 

 

 

	Number of Websites	Proportion
cn	2,216,437	77.0%
com	552,898	19.2%
net	87,713	3.0%
org	21,005	0.7%
合计	2,878,053	100.0%
Note: This data does not include websites under edu.cn domains.

 

 

 

 

Total Number of Webpages	Number	16,086,370,233
Static Webpages	Number	7,891,388,272
	Percent of Total	49.06%
Dynamic Webpages	Number	8,194,981,961
	Percent of Total	50.94%
Static/Dynamic Webpage Ratio		0.96:1
Webpage Size (Total Byte-count)	KB	460,217,386,099
Average Number of Webpages per Website	Number	5,588
Average Byte-count per Webpage	KB	28.6

China’s international outlet bandwidth reached 640,286.67 Mbps in 2008 which is 63.6% higher than in 2007. This is a higher growth rate than the growth rate of the number of netizens. The speed at which Chinese netizens can access international websites has increased and their usage experience has further improved.