[Update 7th July: A modified version of this article is publish on CircleID.]

I receive some email from friends asking me if I know of the recent IPv9 news from China. I thought I should just blog about it and point them to this entry.

I heard of them first time back in 2001. The technology is developed by 十进制网 called “数字域名” which translate roughly to ‘Numerical Domain Name”. They call it ADDA (All Digital Domain Address) and then later IPv9. (Okay, I laughed back then too so don’t hold back yourself ;-)

The technology¹ as I understand can be summarise as follows: The 10 digits they refer to are phone numbers (China uses 10 digit local phone number). The idea is that you can navigate the web by using phone numbers in the browser. The technology is basically a modified DNS and the business model is to get you to registered your phone numbers with them.

So it isn’t really IP as you would think. But despite these, they seem pretty well connected in China and have support from Ministry of Information Industry (MII) among others. However, I have not seen any actual deployment anywhere. Lots of press release but thats about it.

¹ There is a article in Sina.com explaining the technology pretty well but it is written in Chinese.

² The whole hype maybe dying out on its own soon.