Here comes IPv6...guess who is not ready

In about 100 days, the United States Federal Government will be required to be running large portions of their systems on IPv6. Now, for the non-technical in the crowd, it means that the address your PC uses to connect to the Internet, in most cases, is IPv4. Version 4 has been around almost since most of you started networking your machines to the Internet (it was around in the early 90s when I started doing all of this). IP version 6, which debuted in 1995 was designed to "fix" some of the things that were broken in IPv4, such as the limited address space (it may surprise you but there are only so many addresses in IPv4 that can be allocated). IPv6 increases the address space to some ridiculous number like 1000 per cubic meter of the Earth - in other words A LOT!.

So, as part of my testing, I figured I would call my ISP and request a block. Might as well get while the getting is good right?

So, here is some of my chat with my ISP (try not to laugh those of you that are techincal):

Me: I want a block of IPv6 addresses. How do I request them?
ISP: As I understand, you wish to block the IP Address of any Domain name. Am I correct?
Me: Negative. I want to request a block (say a /48) of IPv6 addresses.

As you can see, we are off to a roaring start.

But it gets better:

ISP: I apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. I am not getting your concern correctly, could you please elaborate your concern once again for me?
Me: I would like to request a block of IPv6 addresses for use on my home network. How do I do that?
ISP: Alright. As I understand, you wish to block of General Unicast IPv6 addresses for your Home Network. Am I correct?
Me: Correct.
ISP: I would love to assist you however we have a different department...

So, I call the department...and they do not even know what I am talking about...until they find a supervisor...who tells them that the "service" is not supported.

Tell me again why the Fed is pushing to convert?

Now, how do I apply for an IPv6 address block?