About three plus a half decades after its beginning, the IPv4 standard is just about before this summer comes to a close and the US could use up the last of its IP addresses, based on a report from the Wall Street Journal. So it is on to another standard: IPv6 and its own support for around 340 undecillion IP addresses.

Changing to IPv6 will not be straightforward — actually, there isn’t much that ever is straightforward.

For the typical Internet surfer, there will not be much to see. However, for companies, they will be hit by the changeover in their pockets.

IP addresses are the numeric names given to computer hardware, that range from house routers to enterprise servers. Furthermore, people enjoy words better than numbers and it is much simpler to see Facebook.com than it’s to recall “66.220.159.255” or one of the hundreds of thousands of the website’s other IP addresses.

The price of an IP address, like most other goods, does not have a fixed price. And as companies look to expand their internet presence as well as the IPv4 real estate dwindles, the costs for IPv6 IPs will increase significantly in cost.

Large businesses should have little difficulty bearing the expenses of changing over to IPv6, but the small guys and gals could fight. The typical cost for an IP address runs at around $11.25 per address, but, again, that cost will certainly increase shortly.

Gartner Research estimates the expense of the IPv6 migration will cost the typical IT department about seven percent of their yearly funding. And together with the cost for buying new IPs, organizations may also need to make hardware changes on the rear end to be able to support the newer standard.

Several of the US’ biggest technology firm jumped out ahead of the problem.