It is only a small footnote in the news, but I am sure 03/02/2011 will make
it into the history books. Partly because it is Chinese New Year, but
mostly because today the internet ran out of addresses. There are
still administrative buffers in the pipeline, but the source (the NRO)
has run dry.

Of course experts disagree over what that means, and they disagree
even more in the predictions for the future. Anyway, here is mine:

Existing players in the market have enough IP addresses, for now.
They are not interested in a smooth transition to IPv6, the next
generation protocol designed to solve the problem, and they may even
hamper the transition. Some player (such as HP) with a lot of IP
addresses may try to capitalise on this. I am not going to
guess whether they are able to, but if they do, it could be a gold
mine. This could harm the transition to IPv6, but I hope that reason
will prevail, especially if the existing players use their IPv4
addresses in anti-competitive way.

The transition to IPv6 will be painful. Every piece of software
(using network connections) needs to be updated. A lot of network
equipment will either not support IPv6 or not support it correctly,
leading to a massive need for replacements. The transition will start
in a certain region, most likely in Asia, possibly in China or India.
A good transition mechanism will be crucial. Ideological reasons have
delayed such mechanisms for a long time, but in the last two years, both
NAT64 and 6rd have been created, and together they could easy the
transition a lot. It will take a about a decade, and at the end of it
the industry may probably be very different from now.

If that seems a bit vague, I am sorry, but this is the best my glass
ball can do. I would call it the silver scenario: it is kind of in
the middle between a smooth and organised transition (which seems
increasingly unlikely), and IPv4 trench warfare (which I really hope
we can avoid). There are many different predictions out there, but I
find a lot of them much less plausible.

I feel reasonably ready for IPv6 (except that no ISP in the
UK or many other countries supports it so far, and neither do most of the routers)