India has started to roll out plans for switching the nation from IPv4 to IPv6. The country is demanding that all entitiesfrom federal and state government ministries to public sector companiesbe migrated to the new Internet protocol version by March of 2012.

India has started to roll out plans for switching the nation from IPv4 to IPv6. The country is demanding that all entitiesfrom federal and state government ministries to public sector companiesbe migrated to the new Internet protocol version by March of 2012.

Why IPv6? Simply put, the world is running out of available IP addresses under the IPv4 protocol. According to reports released just last week, it's estimated that there's less than one year before the full IPv4 address table32-bit numbers used to identify network-connected devicesis completely exhausted. That's 4.3 billion IP addresses, a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the number of possible addresses provided by IPv6: two to the power of 128.

According to PC World India, a future rollout of new 3G and broadband wireless access services is putting the crunch on the country to switch over to IPv6 as soon as possible. The country has already finished auctioning licenses for both and it plans to begin rolling out 3G spectrum officially in September.

The United States hasn't put quite as much initiative behind switching to IPv6, reports Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb. And the country is nearing the end of its available IPv4 block as well. According to John Curran, of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, the United States has used up roughly 94 percent of its available addresses, and the remaining six percent should be tapped within the next year.

Comcast, home to more than 16 million individual U.S. Internet subscribers, started the first residential testing of its own IPv6-backed service in late June. It's not native IPv6 addressing, however; rather, the company's 6RD technology tunnels an IPv6 address over a IPv4 network. The second phase of the four-part test will include dual-stacking, or the simultaneous distribution of both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses to address the former's deployment and the latter's operability.

Regardless, Curran notes that this transition to IPv6 amongst the nation's ISPs is still occurring quite slowly"deployment is where we're behind," he adds.

Critics of the increased attention being paid to the steady loss of IPv4 addresses consider the situation analogous to the famed Y2K buga lot of hubbub that will ultimately get fixed at the last moment to minimal effect or disruption. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal compares this situation to a 1993 report that detailed how Americans had nearly used up nearly all of the country's allocated telephone numbers.

"The 'number exhaustion' problem, as [the North American Numbering Plan Administration ] calls it, never went away, but fixes kept being found because the system was too valuable to let fall apart," he writes.