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Asians and those in North America are going to be separated on the internet if ISPs / telecoms don't do something. European progress to IPv6 is taking place much faster than in North America. What solutions are available today, and what is being developed? Especially in North America.

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Why the close vote? IP Connectivity is an important topic to systems administrators. – unixman83 Mar 10 '12 at 23:04
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Well, the political slant about Americans not apparently intending to switch to IPv6 is pretty ignorant (given the participation of large American companies and network operators in last year's "test IPv6 day"). – cjc Mar 10 '12 at 23:09
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The IPv6 transition isn't just a problem for the areas of the world with less IPv4 space allocated than North America. ARIN doesn't have enough space for the next couple years, either - and businesses in the region who care about communicating with other regions (there are two types: those who need to, and those who don't yet realize how much they need to) have a vested interest in doing so, regardless of the ridiculous volumes of IPv4 addresses they've hoarded. – Shane Madden Mar 10 '12 at 23:16

closed as not constructive by Zoredache, joeqwerty, RobM, EEAA, Ward Mar 11 '12 at 6:38

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1 Answer

up vote 11 down vote accepted

Everyone is still using IPv4 addresses, for any common use on the Internet. The person in Japan will have contracted with an ISP there, and would have been assigned an IPv4 address from the pool of available addresses for that ISP. The address blocks may have been fully assigned to ISPs, but that doesn't mean that the ISPs have fully assigned all their addresses to customers.

It should be noted that IPv6 migration is a complicated issue, and parties from all nationalities are working on the problem, including Americans.

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