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Quote:Moving to IPv6 will present a number of challenges for the U.S. federal government, not the least of which is the associated price tag, which could hit $75 billion.

The government is supposed to be on a relatively rapid path toward IPv6 migration since the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandated (PDF file) this past August that the federal government move to IPv6 by June 2008.

In terms of infrastructure for IPv6, the deployment of IPv6-capable DNS (define) services is noted to be one of the first infrastructure components that should be undertaken as part of a deployment plan.

Quote:TO THE lay observer it seems like an infinite network of computers, servers and cables stretching around the globe.

But the worldwide web is filling up. So quickly, it turns out, that programmers have had to devise a new one.

Of the internet addresses available, more than three quarters are already in use, and the remainder are expected to be assigned by 2009. So, what will happen as more people in developing countries come online? The answer is IPv6, a new internet protocol that has more spaces than the old one: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 spaces, in fact. “Currently there’s four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there’s obviously an issue there,” said David Kessens, chairman of the IPv6 working group at RIPE, one of five regional internet registries in charge of rolling it out...

Quote:TCP/IP has served us well since it was born in 1981, but for some time now it has been clear that the IP part has a limitation that makes continued growth of the Internet for decades to come problematic. In order to accommodate a large number of hosts but not waste too much space in the IP packet on overhead, the TCP/IP designers settled on an address size of 32 bits. With 32 bits, it's possible to express 4,294,967,296 different values. Over half a billion of those are unusable as addresses for various reasons, giving us a total of 3.7 billion possible addresses for hosts on the Internet. As of January 1, 2007, 2.4 billion of those were in (some kind of) use. 1.3 billion were still available and about 170 million new addresses are given out each year. So at this rate, 7.5 years from now, we'll be clean out of IP addresses; faster if the number of addresses used per year goes up...