Within the last hour, the regional internet registry for the Asia Pacific region, APNIC, requested two more blocks of IP addresses. This will trigger the previously agreed-upon final distribution of IPv4 addresses to the regional registries.
Immediately, we will probably see very little technically from this although it will no doubt gain significant media coverage. Everything will keep working, despite some rather silly prophecies to the contrary. The regional registries will have enough space to keep on allocating IPv4 blocks to ISPs for a few months.
But the clock is very much ticking and any service providers not already working on IPv6 has merely been hitting the snooze button. End users are not going to notice for a while, perhaps not for years and if service providers get it right hopefully never. But providers that do not have IPv6 up and running by the time they run out of IPv4 address space are suddenly going to find themselves in a world of pain.
And to any readers who are interested about the status of their IPv6 connectivity, you can test it out using this website: http://test-ipv6.com/
Not affiliated or anything, but it’s an awesome site that I only heard of recently and it does a good job.
I don’t have an IPv6 address – but that’s because at home I have a Virgin Media connection, rather than work ADSL. Virgin don’t do IPv6!