"The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses ran out in February, and the Asia Pacific regional Internet registry announced last week that it has doled out all but its last 16.7 million IPv4 addresses which are being held in reserve. Von Loew thinks most of his initial customers will come from Asia where IPv4 is already exhausted. There are still a few free ones from RIPE so there is no need for Europeans to buy them. But he insists that he has been contacted by a number of potential buyers. He has established a minimum block of 256 IPv4 addresses -- known as a /24 -- for his trading site..."

"It's 2011, IPv4 addresses are officially exhausted, and the world's largest router maker, Cisco, still doesn't support IPv6 in its best-selling line of Linksys wireless routers. This is true even for the new E4200 router released just last month (priced at $180). The company has promised to have IPv6 support for the Linksys line by the spring but has not been specific."

"The Internet Society, an organization dedicated to the good of the Internet, is organizing "World IPv6 Day" on June 8 of this year. Web giants Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, with a combined one billion visitors per day, are participating by enabling IPv6 for their main services that day. Content distributors Limelight and Akamai are also joining the party by enabling their customers to participate. But unlike during the IETF IPv6 experiment, IPv4 won't be turned off."

Are We There Yet? Almost.. According to some experts we just might be on the starting process for the end-game. At the beginning of the 2010 there was only 8% of the unallocated addresses remaining. When you factor in the adoption rate of new device being added to the Internet, it's only a matter of time. So what are we waiting for, the end of the Internet?

Currently, our Comcast High-Speed Internet Service (CHSI) uses Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, such as 192.168.1.1. The supply of IPv4 addresses is limited and will eventually be exhausted. As a result, in order for the Internet to continue to grow, ISPs and other organizations need to transition to IP version 6 (IPv6) addresses, which take a very different form, such as 2001:0db8:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf.

Comcast has been a leader in IPv6 development for over 5 years.