Back in November last year, we wrote that the "IPCalypse" is only 100 days away. At the time, this seemed like a long time, but the IPcalypse is coming early, with current estimates that IPv4 addressing will run out in the next 9 days.
As of writing, Hurricane Electric reports that a mere 33 million addresses are unallocated, which equates to about 2% of overall IPv4 addresses that were ever available. Neowin will be covering the effects of the IP exhaustion later this week.
IPv6 was developed to supercede IPv4 -- which was originally released in 1981 -- and was finalised in 1998, over 12 years ago, but rapid adoption was never seen, and the protocol is still not used widely. This may change shortly, it is likely there will be rapid adoption of IPv6 as newer organizations have issues obtaining the older addresses.
Some large organizations will be performing tests of IPv6 in the near future, with World IPv6 day coming up on 8 June -- even though this date is after the IPv4 exhaustion date -- where companies such as Google, Facebook and Cisco (amongst others) will be using IPv6 for 24 hours.
The IPcalypse is only 9 days away....