According to Hurricane Electric, the industry will start seeing the first residential users that cannot get an IPv4 address from their ISP sometime around the end of this year.
The situation is not as dire in the UK, Infosecurity notes, as ISPs here have a pool of dynamic addresses that are normally allocated to their broadband users on a rolling basis.
Most UK ISPs offer fixed IPv4 addresses as a value-added option, but Infosecurity's sources suggest that UK ISPs will almost certainly find the process of getting new blocks of IPv4 addresses more expensive, as demand starts to outstrip supply in the industry.
Martin Levy, Hurricane Electric's director of IPv6 strategy, said that, in order to avoid costly capital expenditures down the road and possible failure on their business continuity plans, companies must make the migration to IPv6 sooner rather than later.
"Companies that fail to migrate to IPv6 will face a number of painful options, including buying expensive equipment to cobble together an address-sharing scheme or going out to the marketplace to acquire IP address space at a potentially exorbitant price", he said.
Hurricane Electric claims that its global internet backbone is one of the few that is IPv6-native at each and every customer connection and at all locations it operates at.
Just to make life interesting, the backbone provider has posted an IPv4 exhaustion countdown application that claims to show the time left until all IPv4 addresses are depleted.
According to the primary level SP, once the final allocation at the IANA occurs, the application will continue to monitor the five regional internet registry (RIRs) address space allocations.
Hurricane Electric says that the world's five RIRs - AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE - each has a finite amount of IPv4 space left for allocations to operators and end users.