"By the end of June, active users of China's IPv6-based network (internet protocol version 6) accounted for about 20 percent of the total internet users," said Wu Hequan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the president of the Internet Society of China. 

IPv6-based network is a brand new version of the internet that can connect to almost every object on earth, allowing the Internet of Things (IoT) to function on a global scale.

Read more: What You Need to Know about IPv6

"Although the number of active users has seen rapid growth, the proportion of Ipv6 network traffic to the overall internet traffic is relatively low," Wu noted during the 18th China Internet Conference, which opened in Beijing on Tuesday.

According to the report released in 2018, among China's 829 million online users, only a small portion uses IPv6-based network.

A total of 23,430 blocks/32 of IPv6 addresses had been allocated in the Chinese mainland by the end of 2017, according to Yang Weiping, deputy head of the R&D department of the China Internet Network Information Center. "The number is the second-largest in the world, but the actual application level is still quite low," said Yang.

"We've suggested that the government websites play a leading role in the network deployment, and indeed, they have done a good job, so do the state-owned enterprises," Wu added. "But for those private websites, a lot of work is expected to be done."

Apart from websites, China's Ipv6-based network also needs to upgrade the household network gateway, as well as internet connectivity between different network operators, Wu explained.

China aims to have up to 200 million active IPv6 users by the end of 2018 and more than 500 million by 2020, according to an action plan issued in 2017.