If you haven’t heard, we are running out of IPv4 addresses. Actually, we already have ran out of them. The solution is to migrate to IPv6, which should provide more Internet addresses than this world will ever need. In preparations for the eventual migration, sites like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Bing are going to test IPv6 for the day.

So how will this affect you? If all goes right, it won’t. As a matter of fact, if all goes according to plan, you may have never known it happened if you hadn’t read about it. But what will happen if things don’t go according to plan? At worst, you may see some slow response or timeouts when visiting sites that are participating in the test.

So, for the next 24 hours or so don’t freak out if it takes you a few extra minutes to update your status on Facebook. I am sure your “friends” will understand.

How could this happen? Why didn’t they design IPv4 to handle a larger number of devices? Well, IPv4 can support about 4 billion unique addresses. That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It sure sounded like a lot when IPv4 was first design. Actually, 4 billion is a lot until you think about how many IP enabled devices there are today. How many devices that you personally own require an IP address? Let’s start counting, your PC, DVR, game console, cell phone, printer, and the list goes on. Take my parents for example, they are on what I would call the low tech side of things, but they have at least five devices that require IP addresses. Take someone like myself and you are looking at least 20. You multiply that by the number of families in the world that have Internet access and all of the sudden 4 billion seems like a very small number.

So how do we know that in twenty years we won’t be right back here with IPv6? IPv6 can support over 340 undecillion unique numbers. How many is undecellion you ask? It a 1 followed by 36 zeros. It looks like: 1000000000000000000000000000000000000. It has been said that you could assign 100 IPv6 addresses to every atom on the surface of the earth and still have some left over. I haven’t done the math to prove this but if it’s true, we shouldn’t have to worry about running out of addresses.

So what does all of this mean to you? I guess that depends on who you are. If you are simply an average Internet user it will probably mean nothing. If you are someone that has to support a corporate network, it means that you will have eventually upgrade your systems to support IPv6 (if you haven’t already done so). In the end, things should continue to work for the end users just as they do today. That is, of course, if things go as planned. If they don’t go smoothly, you may wake up to no email one day…