I edited out over and replaced it with depleted to satisfy the concern about the headline, but I didn't even like doing that. The cavalier attitude that "nothing is really wrong, keep doing what we're doing" has been an extensive contributor to the problematic situation we're in right now.
People have been beating the drum, as you say, because this day was foreseen more than a decade ago. IPv6 has been in use for far longer than a decade. It was anticipated that we'd be most of the way through the transition by now, but we're not, partially due to "nothing's wrong" attitudes.
Edit: By it in the first sentence, I meant IPv4's time (and was responding to the parent's usage of time running out). I don't mean IPv4 addresses have been exhausted, as I'm quite aware they're not. However, IPv4 has reached the end of its usefulness, is the underlying root of my meaning.
IPv4 addresses are not "out". There are a finite number of IPv4 addresses just as there is a finite amount of land on earth. We are not "out" of land are we? The regional registries haven't even finished allocating the addresses (let alone the low utilization rate of allocated addresses).
If the need of migrating to IPv6 is so great and it so valuable to do so, why the need for artificial pronouncements?
Yes, IPv6 is about 13-years old (from draft RFC approval in 1998). I view this as a more of a failure of IPv6, however.
By my calculations, you'd only need to spin up 50 or so amazon instances, and they could cover the entire IP space in a day doing 1k pings/second each.
These guys have been mapping the IPv4 space via ping over time (since 2003) and have an interactive browsable map that also shows blocks marked for localhost/private networks/multicast, etc and which registrars control which regions. It is pretty neat. Most recent data is Nov 2010. Since then the 11 /8 blocks that show as free have been allocated.
