The IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority- www.iana.org ) has allocated the last IP address blocks from the global IPv4 central address pool, ending all debates over when this would happen.  Several months remain before Regional Registries consume all their remaining regional IPv4 address pools, with recent trends suggesting that Asia, Europe, and North America will exhaust in that order within a month or two on either side of July 1, 2011.

”The Internet has become the global communication network, now is the time to sustain its growth and stability by integrating IPv6. IPv6 adds great value to IPv4″ states Dr. Vint Cerf, Honorary Chair, IPv6 Forum.

”The Internet is for Everyone.  IPv6 represents the next stage of the Internet’s evolution and will help make this vision a reality“ states Lynn St.Amour, President & CEO, Internet Society

The eventuality of this day was foreseen by the IETF almost 20 years ago, and a replacement was developed. In 1999 the IPv6 Forum was established by the IETF IPv6 Task Force with the mission to educate and promote the new protocol, and now that we have reached the end of the IPv4 free pool, that mission is more urgent than ever. The IPv4 based Internet will not stop working, but it will stop growing, while the IPv6 based Internet is designed to grow for generations to come.

In our daily lives, failure of the Internet infrastructure or restrictions on its capabilities to add new users or support the worldwide economy are no longer acceptable. Therefore, the IPv6 Forum recommends to all people involved in ICT, that now is the time to leverage 2011 and 2012 for planning and rolling out the new version of the Internet Protocol. Enabling IPv6 in all ICT environment is not the end game but is now a critical requirement for continuity in all Internet business and services going forward. Production quality deployments will take time, Starting late and accelerating the process will compromise quality and significantly raise the costs. The last thing that everyone should avoid is to have to rapidly deploy an unnecessarily costly IPv6 infrastructure to sustain growth and communicate with customers, suppliers, and partners.

Transition planning and adoption of IPv6 is now critical to the on-going stability and growth of Internet Protocol based ICT, not only in the public Internet but in every facet of your office, home and mobile electronic existence where TCP/IP and other IP protocols are used. Training, management, support, billing, security and applications development need to be engaged to allow you to be IPv6 ready.

This call is more critical to developing nations that strive to modernize their critical Internet infrastructure making it future proof and protecting their investments.

“The time is now! And resistance is futile” states Latif Ladid, IPv6 Forum President Senior Researcher at University of Luxembourg, Security and Trust (SnT) Center. Emeritus Trustee, Internet Society.

“Attempting to predict this date has been an interesting challenge over the years, given the chaotic nature of global Internet growth. The challenge ahead for the larger community will be to move past denial, mourning, and grief, and get on with the task of IPv6 deployment.” States Tony Hain, IPv6 Forum Fellow, Technical Director, North American IPv6 Task Force

“If you think you can ignore IPv6, think again. As new IPv4 addresses cannot be acquired the industry will be faced with customers / partners / suppliers who can only be reached via IPv6. Our industry will need to face the “balkanization” of the Internet. It is time to act and to deploy IPv6 now.” states Yanick Pouffary, NAv6TF Technology Director, IPv6 Forum Fellow and IPv6 Forum (Ready & Enabled) Logo Programs Chairperson.

To test your IPv6 connection and see if the globe is spinning for you, click on this link:  http://ipv6forum.org/test_ipv6.php