I am at MENOG5 where we are doing the pre-conference workshops. Together with Philip Smith I am teaching an IPv6 routing workshop working with students from the operators in the Middle East.
During the workshop yesterday, it Philip said something that made me realize how little time we have left to deploy IPv6.
The "original" IPv6 RFC1883 was published in December 1995. That is 14 years ago. If I look at the IPv4 Address Space report at www.potaroo.net we will see that
Projected IANA Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 10-Nov-2011Projected RIR Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 22-Jan-2013
That means that we have 23 months left until IANA pool run-out. I yesterday twitted that we had as many months left as years we have been working on IPv6. Even if we count from the start of the IPng effort, that is not quite true. But 23 months is not a long time to get deployment going. The good news is what you see workshops such as the one that me and Philip are doing right now, is that it's actually not that hard to deploy. The cost is not that high as CAPEX is covered as part of normal upgrade cycles and backbone deployments can in many (most?) cases be done fairly quickly.
The problems are still with end-users / DSL deployments and lack of support, but that is coming as well.