IPv6: it's time to make the move

megank@arin.net W h e n e n g I n e e r s d e p l o y e d I p v I n 1981, four billion IP addresses seemed like plenty. As the world caught on to the commercial possibilities of the Internet, though, engineers realized that the number of IP addresses simply wasn’t enough for all the laptops, mobile devices, Web servers, routers, and other devices coming online. IPv6, the new numbering system, enlarges the address pool drastically, but it is unfamiliar and relatively unused so far. In this article, we show that, with only about 16% of the IPv4 address space remaining, the world will run out of IPv4 address blocks within a few years, and we suggest what you can start doing now to prepare for the transition to IPv6.