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I choose to believe publically available bandwidth charts showing an exponential curve

Here are some charts. Hardly a success story.

http://www.labs.lacnic.net/stats/

http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html

You also have to remember that total traffic is growing exponentially, so merely exponential IPv6 growth is not enough to close the gap unless the base is bigger than IPv4's.

IANA, the top level of organizations which handle the allocation of IP addresses, has run out of IPv4 addresses more than a year ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orJpEJuZick

The regional registries still have addresses and are going through them at different rates, so they'll run out at different points in the future.

RIPE (Europe) is down to about 40 million addresses, including the last 16 million which will be assigned under a different, more stringent policy: http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion/ipv4-available-pool-graph

APNIC (Asia) is already on the last /8 block: http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/graphical-information

ARIN (North America): http://www.compusophia.com/en/ipaddrstat/ipv4_arin_pool.html

LACNIC (South America): http://www.lacnic.net/en/registro/espacio-disponible-ipv4.html

AfriNIC (Africa):
http://www.compusophia.com/en/ipaddrstat/ipv4_afrinic_pool.html

When those are depleted, it's going to be NAT all the way down.

I thought there was an announcement that the IPv4 address space is now totally exhausted. Or at least there are no new blocks to be assigned. The tunnel broker, Hurricane Electric indicates that IPv4 is exahusted.

The original such announcement came from APNIC I think a year ago, when they indicated that they were out of IPv4 address assignments to their ISPs. More recently, they changed their transfer policy so that even if 2 organizations want to undergo a transfer of IPv4 addresses from one to the other, the recipient has to justify their requirement for IPv4. In short, getting IPv4 is getting more difficult in this region.

ARIN so far seems to have pretty much the same policy that it had months ago - nothing has changed, even if Comcast and HE are indicating that they are out of IPv4 addresses. RIPE will be distributing /22s, while AfriNIC was supposed to have run out by August 11 but their status is unclear and not current. LACNIC too seems to be @ an end of its allocations.

Given all that, there is no reason why any ISP shouldn't start forcing the move to IPv6, since that's the only place where all the addresses really are.

There's a lot of info here too:
Arin
Ripe Ncc
Apnic
Lacnic

the current system of handing out addresses (which have no value as such and should not be charged for, although an administrative fee can be charged for setting it up, which quite a few ISP's do) is essentially global through RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC and ARIN. So if China runs out, it means we have all run out.

Admittedly, the US has quite a bit of legacy space, but I'm sure that large chunks of it will be reclaimed for everyone, should the need arise.

In the US, the idea is still that the Internet is American, so the US will be ok. That is exactly why the ARIN region is (too) slow to pick up on IPv6.

Ofcourse, IPv6 may not happen in the end (there are still quite a few bugs to be ironed out by the IETF et al), but I hope it does, because NAT is getting old real fast. Port forwarding helps a little, but remains a hack at best. The pain of having several machines do the same things behind one IP address (ICQ, webserver, netmeeting) is simply not worth it when I can get over 65000 subnets (with billions of addresses in each one) assigned to me with IPv6.(Everyone that could subnet, should receive a /48 according to current policy, no extra charge)

We could then finally do all the things that we should have been able to now.

And currently, IPv6 is totally free. Everyone gives free transit to everyone, IPv6 is not taken into account with the fee that the RIR's charge their members (at least in the RIPE region, I think the other regions too).

This will change ofcourse, but IPv6 is already a major improvement over IPv4, the US will feel the pain of coming late everywhere if they don't prepare.

CC

...but this story is crud on so many levels.

• 3FFE::/16 is the experimental 6bone space, where you try out allocation policies before settling on a real one. They've settled on a real one. Even better, it's the same in all three (er, four) regions. The 6bone's purpose is fulfilled , we're in production mode and, as was always intended, it's time to think about retiring it.
• How many times: IP address don't cost money. Sure, the RIRs charge for the service of allocation, and your ISP is entitled to charge for the services around them. They do their job pretty well, and with consensus of the community (a rarity in this day and age). Great as Bob Fink is, do you really want to continue trusting address allocation to one guy as a volunteer project?
• You get addresses from your ISP.
• You get addresses from your ISP.
• You get addresses from your ISP. There are loads of them. If you need them, you can have them. The expense is not in getting the damn addresses. "Experimental" does not mean "free". "Production" does not mean "business".
• AftanGustur: IPv6 is not a bastard protocol, routers don't need to fragment anymore, and the IETF is not working on a new damn protocol. You don't cite any sources, so I can't refute it. Please do.

Guys, there are a lot of misconceptions about IPv6. I appreciate this - it's not an intuitive subject, and it's possible to believe you know a lot more about it than you actually do. But, the details are there. Please do the reading and start asking your ISP for connectivity. No, your real ISP. There are people out there who want to deploy this, now, and we're waiting for customer demand. Go nuts!

Dave