To view the full article in its entirety, please visit eWeek: Ready or Not, Here's IPv6

It’s almost time to get serious about IPv6, sports fans, whether you like it or not. Are you ready? I’m not, but it’s not my fault.

Although numerous ways have been implemented to stretch the limited address space of IPv4–the “classic” dotted decimal that defined the gold rush days of the Internet–recent estimates indicate that the 6 percent of the available address block which is not currently allocated could be exhausted by next summer.

This isn’t anything like the first time we’ve heard this, but this time, I’m inclined to take heed. Given the explosion of Internet use overseas, and the insane proliferation of mobile devices, I’m surprised we’ve managed to forestall this as long as we have, with the help of tricks such as CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) and NAT (Network Address Translation). IPv6 was first defined in 1996, and I’ve been coming across it in the field for several years. Some applications need to be rethought to work with it; others won’t notice any difference.

The 2008 Olympics in Beijing were a massive test for IPv6; 12 years after the protocol was defined as an RFC, a major world event ran all its network operations on it, and unless I missed something, that part of the games went rather smoothly. But the Olympic Games are somewhat of a special case, I admit; there wasn’t a lot of installed base to cope with, and the real challenge lies in bringing IPv6 to a large bureaucratic organization that has an installed base going back decades, but an incentive to implement modern networking technology. Say, for example, Uncle Sam.