BT has began trialling IPv6 in small areas of the UK, alongside its normal IPv4 network. This comes a couple of weeks after Sky began pushing out a firmware upgrade to enable IPv6 on some customers’ routers. There is still no timeline for a full scale IPv6 switchover in the UK (or really everywhere else in the world), but with last week’s news that North America is formally out of new IPv4 addresses it’s going to have to occur sooner instead of later.

Last week, some BT FTTC (fibre-to-the-cupboard) subscribers found that their modems were assigned an IPv6 address, along with the standard IPv4 address. In a statement to ISP Review, a BT representative confirmed that the IPv6 trial was continuing “with a little group of BT workers, before moving forward to trials with customers at a subsequent period.”

Because you may understand, there is a reasonably few of complete IPv4 addresses accessible–about 4.3 billion in total, though many of those are allowed for various non public uses. IPv4 addresses, which are managed by regional internet registries (RIRs), were initially handed out in a reasonably willy nilly way: if you needed a block of addresses, it was quite simple to get one.

In the early ’90s, yet, when the variety of Internet users began to burst in earnest, address fatigue began to be a subject of discussion. By the mid-2000s, that discussion took on a tone that was somewhat more distressed as it became clear the variety of Internet users was accelerating at a substantial speed.

It is most likely a matter of months rather than years, although it is difficult to call when those RIRs will really be exhausted.

In practice, it is easy to change new apparatus to IPv6, however that does not mean that billions of older apparatus cease using IPv4… and all of those old apparatus still need to be able to speak to the new ones.

Most modern devices support both IPv6 and IPv4, and the gear providers are willing to go with their double-stack options. Now we are just awaiting the ISPs and other Web providers to: a) reconfigure and test everything out; and b) stump up tons of money to purchase and retrofit double-stack gear.