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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

Let me get some popcorn.

Any ideas of what will happen next? How far are we until some home users with outdated ISPs be blocked from the internet?

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Nothing happens immediately --- the regional authorities still have some free space left, although some are planning to get more stingy. (The discussion here --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion --- is at least a starting point for the curious. FWIW, the first that's likely to really run out is APNIC, for the Asia/Pacific region, within the next three to six months; the RIRs for Europe and North America expect to run out in maybe a year or so, and those for Africa and Latin America expect a couple of years' left of run room.)

Once congestion hits (a few months to a year), I think ISPs natting ipv4 clients, or demanding a premium price from anyone who wants a routable address, is likely to happen somewhat more quickly than ipv6 to the home. But that's based on no inside information...

Also keep in mind there's likely to be a bit of IP reallocation happening. There are a number of companies with full /8 blocks they can't possibly fully utilize.

Yeah, HP as 2 /8s and they seem to be shrinking rather than growing.

The Department of Defence Network Information Centre has 151 million addresses. I'm not sure what they're doing with them but they could probably squeeze by with just 100 million if they had to.

Shrinking headcount perhaps.. I would imagine that the number of computing devices at HP/EDS is significantly larger than the number of staff..

What I don't understand is what happens to website hosting? Will the cost of a Linode go up? Will they be able to get IP addresses for new customers?

That's a question probably best asked directly to Linode (esp. if you are a paying customer).

As a basis for making up your own mind: Linode has, at the moment, nine /20's allocated. At 80% utilisation, that means roughly 30'000 IPv4 addresses.

I'm pretty sure nothing will happen. They likely have several blocks already allocated which give them enough headroom for growth.

I think mobile carriers will be some of the first to transition. The number of devices they need to connect is exploding, and since they have more control over the devices than general ISPs, they can smooth the transition.

Nokia's been pushing IPv6 for a while. It apparently has a significant improvement in battery life because they no longer require devices to check in and renew DHCP leases as often.

I'm under the impression that many mobile carriers already NAT their client's devices, so they've already "fixed" their problem.

I'm pretty sure T-mobile does something like this. I believe you can get a non-NAT'd address if you specifically ask for it.

This is happening already. All of Verizon's currently shipping LTE (4G) devices have native IPv6.

Verizon actually require 4G devices to support ipv6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#IPv6_support

It will take a long time if it will ever happen. ISP's can still assign the old IP's they already have while they roll out new modems with IPV6 addresses.

not quite; there are issues with whether those clients can talk to the rest of the net not yet on ipv6 [like, 90% of it or something]).

What appears to be happening is that people are just now seriously beginning to ask the questions about ipv6. We're seeing stuff like incredible performance penalties, poor routing and a complete lack of 6to4 (and back) support anywhere.

There's a long long slog to go and we're just getting started.

Why would anyone be blocked?

No available addresses, or not compatible with many places?

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