First it was Asia that has come close to exhausting its supply of IPv4 addresses, now it's the other side of the pond. According to this report, the European Internet registry may exhaust its supply of IPv4 addresses as early as this week. That is expected to encourage more companies doing business internationally to adopt the IPv6 protocol.
Earlier this month we reported that North America's address registry, which has some surplus, was expected to start shifting some IPv4 addresses to Asia to help with the crunch. This latest article from Network World U.S. says some 27 million IPv4 addresses have been allocated to European carriers so far this year.