Remember the Greek myth about Sisyphus, who was cursed to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill and then watch it roll down again for eternity? The story brings to mind IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol, which is known as IPv4.

Jim Bound, Chair of the North American IPv6 Task Force, CTO of the IPv6 Forum and a Senior HP Fellow, has been pushing the IPv6 boulder up the network hill for more than a decade. Bound doesn’t think the task of promoting IPv6 is as unending or pointless as Sisyphus’ boulder, but he does joke that IPv6 may not get deployed during his lifetime. (Read about “How the feds are dropping the ball on IPv6.”) Read the latest WhitePaper - Affordable Availability Monitoring

Carolyn Duffy Marsan spoke recently with Bound about the status of IPv6 adoption in the United States. Here are excerpts from the conversation:

The IPv6 community is now talking about 2010 as the date for IPv4 address exhaustion. Is that date real?

It is very real. It could be plus or minus one year. The consensus is that we have two to four years until we run out of IPv4 addresses. It’s hard to predict how the usage will work. It’s been sporadic over the years. If you go to the IPv6 Forum Web site, you’ll see a counter that shows how much time we feel is left.

What impact should the 2010 date have on corporate network managers?

The first thing they have to ask themselves is if they have enough public IPv4 addresses to sustain their businesses today, which probably they do. But do they have enough public IPv4 addresses to sustain their businesses forever? There will be new services, new users and new reasons for end-node addresses that require public IP addresses, not private IP addresses. Once the IPv4 address pool is gone, they will not be able to get a public IP address unless they move to IPv6. That’s why the registries have said it’s time to upgrade to IPv6 now.

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