Four non-profit internet administrative groups - ICAN, NRO, NAB, and the Internet Society - announced on Friday during a press conference that the pool of IPv4 addresses has become nearly depleted. With the final 7 blocks of IPv4 addresses being allocated to assigned regions (at nearly 17.5 million IP addresses per block) it is not time to immediately panic for people and businesses interested in starting a web site within the next months or possibly years, however, it will definitely move internet service and network providers to begin deploying equipment that supports IPv6.

IPv4 addresses are produced in the form of four octets - four sets of numbers ranging from 0-255 and separated by periods. IPv6 addresses are expressed using eight sets of four digit hexidecimal numbers. While IPv4 protocol describes approximately 4.3 billion (2^32) addresses, IPv6 will create a seemingly unreachable ceiling with approximately 2^128 possible addresses. If you do the math it is overwhelming.

On June 8, 2011, the Internet Society will be staging an event called "World IPv6 day" and expects many major organizations including Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Facebook, and Yahoo to test IPv6 on their networks for a 24 hour period. Although, this is a great step towards IPv6 utilization, expect a longer than desired turnover process. Unfortunately, with IPv4 addresses eventually becoming more and more scarce, expect prices to rise along with other means of exploitation. This could also accelerate the shift to IPv6.