Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Buys 666,000 IP Addresses
RabidMonkey writes "Microsoft has managed to purchase 666,624 IP addresses from the bankrupt Canadian company Nortel for $7.5 million. This works out to $11.25/ip. An exact list of blocks isn't available yet. There has been a lot of discussion on NANOG about whether this allowed or not, and what the implications to the dwindling IPv4 pool may be. Is this the first of many such moves as IPv4 address space has run out? Will ARIN step in and block the sale/transfer? How long will such measures drag out the eventual necessity of IPv6?"
Fucking Devils...
... I'll bet they're all in the 169.* block.
#DeleteChrome
The devil you say?
And I'll even drop the price down to $10/address.
Muah ha ha ha ha...
I always knew Microsoft was Evil. :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Does this mean that companies will start selling IP addresses for increasing amounts of money? should I buy a block of 100 as an investment now? A bit like buying up domain names?
What are your intentions with this block of IP addresses, Microsoft? To whore them out, or help speed the adoption of ipv6 by sitting on them, or neither?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
it is so horrible that microsoft are bailing out a bankrupt businss buy buying assets from them for more than what they are worth... allowing the company to pass the money down to employees that have lost wages... i cant think of anything worse
portfolio
So what you really mean is 667, 000 not 666, 000. But that's not quite as fun :P
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
Note that this is a proposed sale before the bankruptcy judge, not an approved sale.
IANAL, but if this gets approved, that the IP addresses are assets that can be transferred in this manner I imagine there will be some busy attorneys as this goes up the chain of courts.
Does this suggest that the end of the world will coincide with the depletion of IPv4 addresses?
"So don't get programmed by anybody but yourself" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire
They are hemorraging assets left and right. By this time next year I doubt there will be any employees left at "Nortel". It's too bad because they were a major player for so long. That NT-1 switch is a real work horse.
The entire IPv6 situation can be summed up with basic economics: until the cost of acquiring IPv4 addresses exceeds the cost of implementing IPv6 - for developers and service providers alike - a transition will not occur. None of you want to hear it, but Service Provider NAT is actually less expensive than IPv6 right now. A much more likely future scenario instead of widespread IPv6 adoption is that you will be paying extra for a globally routable address instead of a NAT'd address.
Disclaimer: I work for one of the largest telcos in North America.
This is it. When real companies pay real money for IP4 addresses, it is the beginning of the end.
Suddenly IP6 day seems a lot more interesting.
When XP is finally dead in another 10 years, these IP addresses will be worth two cups of coffee. The return on investment is phenomenal!
(comparatively speaking, of course)
Does this mean that companies will start selling IP addresses for increasing amounts of money? should I buy a block of 100 as an investment now? A bit like buying up domain names?
Not bloody likely. Most likely Microsoft will dump what they don't need. With IPv6 around the corner it's like buying 666,000 ice cream cones on a hot Summer day - better use them up before they are no use anymore.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In other news, MIT just gained $189 million dollars worth of assets.
Only 1 address will used by MS, the other 666,623 are for Northwind Traders.
I used to ask managers how much our unused IP addresses were worth and they used to give me a blank stare.
In hindsight, I probably should have taken that as a bad sign.
Yes, for the following reasons.
1. There's money to be made of a scarce resource.
2. It cost money to upgrade equipment and implement IPv6.
3. Because of #2, it no longer makes #1 reliant, and thus will not drive a higher profit margin.
4. They'll double NAT home user accounts to free up IPv4, and charge extra for a real public IP.
5. Implementing #4 causes havoc with P2P and other server-side applications. They want to download anyways, not upload.
In order for IPv6 to be rolled out, I fear the FCC will need to get involved (as with HDTV). And that's just for the US.
Life is not for the lazy.
Looks like the closely packed parallel universes are colliding again. We got a Time Cube infestation here, folks.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I am the IT manager for a smallish company, and we recently purchased another block of 128 addresses even though we only need some of those right now, since we want to be in a position to accommodate for future growth over the next several years.
It is pre 1997 and pre-ARIN, which is not subject to any of the transfer restrictions or guidelines ARIN as since imposed. Since it is grandfathered in, it is not subject to the annual maintenance dues. Let me know if anyone is interested.
Looks like a clear conflict of interest to me. Speculating on the shortage of IPv4 addresses while owning an operating system that can influence the adoption of IPv6. Now Microsoft has a financial interest in slowing down the IPv6 adoption. Weird...
Nortel had the 47.* Class A block, registered under the Bell Northern Research name. BNR was Northern Telecom's research arm (think Bell Labs to Western Electric) before it was merged into the parent company.
It's Captain Obvious!
"There is also a Transfers to Specified Recipients Policy to allow entities to monetize transfers of extra address space to specified recipients who qualify for the space."
"Monitization" of transfers? Sounds like the sale of IPV4 addresses is okay, at least those administered by the ARIN.
Wanna score some v4? I got some premo shit right here!
In order for IPv6 to be rolled out, I fear the FCC will need to get involved (as with HDTV). And that's just for the US.
I have no doubt the US will be among the last countries to get widespread IPv6 adoptation. Most major Swedish ISPs (Telia, etc) say they will start giving everyone both IPv4 and IPv6 in 2013, and drop IPv4 by 2015. They may delay, the IPv4 drop will depend on how the rest of the world are doing, but still: There will be no local market for IPv4 by 2014. Maby you can still sell address space to poor people like those in the US, who knows, all I'm saying is that the local market, and probably the whole EU market, for IPv4 will be dead soon.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Fuck yeah, I'm going to park on this Comcast DHCP assigned address for the next 10 years then sell if for a fortune!
That NT-1 switch is a real work horse.
The Space Shuttle was a real work horse.
The DC-10, -9, and -8 were real workhorses too.
Heck, even the venerable DC-3 was a hell of a workhorse.
So were steam locomotives.
For that matter, just go back a little more in time, and a good work horse was... a real work horse.
Maybe we should tell them that they do not purchase the IPs, they only purchase a license to use them...
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company 1994-07 LEGACY
016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation 1994-11 LEGACY
Yes, adoption of IPv6 is coming along VERY smoothly; large corporations are being EXTREMELY cooperative about converting to the new standard, thereby ensuring that we will NOT abruptly run out of internet addresses -- in keeping with their usual policy of extreme foresightedness.
*rolls eyes, jerk-off gesture*
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
MS isn't even trying to hide it anymore.
--
make install -not war
This has to go before the judge, etc., so it hasn't actually happened yet. No word as to whether or not ARIN will contest it (as IP addresses are not supposed to be property; they are assigned by ARIN, which reserves rights to take them back) or, if it does, whether or not the judge would pay attention.
But when are we going to get away from this Microsoft is "evil"? Are they any more "evil" tan any other corporation?
They're all evil. What's your point?
Nortel doesn't own the IP addresses, yet their bankruptcy trustees decided to sell them anyway, which is probably not legal. Now whether ICANN actually sues them remains to be seen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(law)
Sales of IP addresses have been common place since about the late 90's or so. I had a class C block for 15 years and had offers many times, but I turned my block into ARIN about 1.5 years ago (yes, it was assigned to me for personal use before the Internet was commercialized, they used to do this). Microsoft has done nothing different from what many other companies have been doing for years. I bet Google has bought IP addresses from companies and individuals. This story only exists because it's "Microsoft".
I have to believe this is for the Azure cloud product. Since each instance of Azure requires a full /21 block of non RFC1918 space and all the addresses within that block must be contiguous. Yes, we all agree that is an insane requirement.
The only real way to ensure that we don't run out of IP space is to rent them, not sell them. Charge a "property tax" of $1 per IP a month and you'll see tons of organizations with class A blocks give back IP space that they weren't using anyway because they can't afford $16M a month. No organization should ever need more than a few class Cs of publicly routable IP space.
I guess Nortel put an "666,624 IPs for sale" ad in the paper, and a Microsoft drone thought "Yo, man, we can get 666,624 Intellectual Properties from a big telephone company, I'm pretty sure there are *some* patents in there we can use to sue everybody else into oblivion" and made a rush purchase. ;-P
Here's my point if I can get past Slashdot's blocks...
There are MORE important "evils" than a goddamn software company.
People are being thrown out of their homes for NO REASON other then a clerical error or because they were suckered by the American Dream of getting rich - in real estate in this case.
Micrsoft is smal potatoes by today's standards.
Actually they wre always small potatoes but some dorks made their software the center of their lives. Good Grief! Get a fuckign grip! MS can have a 100% monopoly on software and it'll only affect 1% of my life ... BFD!
Seems like a pretty stupid investment to me. When we run out of IP4 addresses, then we'll just move to IP6. The IP4 addresses will become worthless obsolete abstract allocations. That's what happens when you try to hoard a completely artificial resource.
I hope so - nothing's going to spur IPv6 adoption like having a dollar cost per IPv4 address that you can show to your boss.
If you can get away with it, fuck yes! At this stage in the game it's probably only lawyer-plated companies like Microsoft that can force this past IANA, but once the market opens up, jump in.
Why would the ISPs care about playing havoc? NATing will break P2P (Which competes with the ISPs own television service), Video on demand (Same), VoIP (Which competes with the ISPs phone service)... they can screw over any potential competition, and in a completly deniable way.
fucking WHOOSH!
you think maybe everyone in this thread is punning on the MS is evil thing on account of the 666K addresses they just bought?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/666_(number)
they're hoping for the GP's scenario - they're speculating on the increasing value of remaining IPv4 addresses.
soon the bubble will burst, there'll be a sub-prime IP mortgage bust and people will be kicked out of their IP addresses if they can't make the payments.
i need to see proof! i'm not investing my money in a more expensive "renewable" IPv6 pipe dream!
i doubt that we're even running out of IPv4 addresses. the world doesn't work like that, and i'd be damned if i'm going to give up my net-enabled gadget way of life in the name of your flawed science!
IPv4 depletion is a MYTH perpetrated by left-wing pinkos trying to cripple the free market and personal freedoms.
640K should be enough for anyone, and that's roughly how many addresses they snagged...
What do you mean? I can already get IPv6 directly from T-Mobile, o-wait, darn it AT&T.
but all the competition they're trying to squeeze out will just switch to v6...
How appropriate
They got millions of 'em.
IPv6 around the corner? It's been around the corner for what now, a decade? Do you see anyone use it? I don't. I'm not even certain most ISPs would route it correctly.
What can MS do with all those IP addresses? Well, it looks kinda useless at a first glance, doesn't it? Let's take a look.
MS has a sizable market share on the desktop. One could easily say they have a de facto monopoly in most companies on the desktop. Now all they have to do is to make sure that their desktop product does not really work well with IPv6. Given that there are many "Windows administrators" in companies that don't even know how to calculate v4 netmasks, all it takes is to make the v6 config tool really, really crappy so it actually takes an admin who knows what he's doing and I'd wager at least 40% of the people currently claiming an "admin" status are out of their league.
Now MS will sell your ISP a v4 IP range for the low cost of 30 bucks an address. Will your company rather buy a C-Class net or train their admin? I predict, most would rather buy an A-Class net before they spend a dime on training or hiring someone with the relevant skill.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Do you guys really need that many sock puppets!?!
*Ducks*
Your boss will ask you "How much does it cost to adopt v6?"
And then he'll buy those v4 addresses.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It was 666624. And that's one (excellent!) way to write out the number.
You can say that as 6.66624*10^5 or (for computer people) 6.66624E5 and that's just as good, if weird-looking.
You can also round that off, and say 6.66*10^5 or 6.66E5 and that is perfectly correct, if imprecise.
You can even say 666 thousand and that's right, too. Think of that as a shorthand Englishy way of using scientific notation. Or use a "k" suffix. (*)
But 666000 is wrong, just as 6.66000*10^5 would be wrong. You're pretending you have 6 significant figures, but you rounded off. Don't specify those trailing zeros unless you really measured them as zeros.
This concludes today's lesson in condescending pedantry. I hope you learned something.
(*) Or is it "K"? Find out in tomorrow's condescending pedantry lesson!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
... how much of Apple's /8 block is still unused? There were advantages to being there at the dawn of time.
That's 2**24 or 16 million addresses.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Net15 (Class A) Hewlett-Packard Company (16,777,214 Hosts)
Net16 (Class A) Digital Equipment Corporation (16,777,214 Hosts)
Multiple Class B (65,534 Hosts) from the many companies they have acquired:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlett-Packard
Think about the size of Compaq/Tandem/EDS/3Com/Palm/etc.
With 324,600 employees, that is well over 100 IPs per employee (Just with the 2 Class As)
I would think ARIN should consider reclaiming subnets a few years after acquisitions...
Another possibility would be to re-provision Class As as Class Bs (break them up)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
If I were a gambling man, my money would be on YES. IPV4 addresses will become increasingly expensive. Perhaps isp's like shitcast will just create a big nat and buy a handful of ip's for all their customers. If the private nat is full, you'll just be SOL... much like their approach to bandwidth "management" today.
Here's my point if I can get past Slashdot's blocks...
There are MORE important "evils" than a goddamn software company.
People are being thrown out of their homes for NO REASON other then a clerical error or because they were suckered by the American Dream of getting rich - in real estate in this case.
Micrsoft is smal potatoes by today's standards.
Actually they wre always small potatoes but some dorks made their software the center of their lives. Good Grief! Get a fuckign grip! MS can have a 100% monopoly on software and it'll only affect 1% of my life ... BFD!
You're confused why a news site for nerds isn't discussing evil financial companies?
There's no place like
No... But I'm sure 2^32 will be sufficient!
Nortel is being broken up and sold off to various other companies. So far chunks have gone to Avaya, Ciena, Ericsson, and GENBAND, and probably others as well.
but all the competition they're trying to squeeze out will just switch to v6...
And what competition is that?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I am for anything that makes the IPv4 resource situation more desperate: Desperate enough that mid-sized derp-a-derp MCSE sysadmin-lead companies will actually have to move to IPv6.
IPv6 won't go mainstream until people start getting desperate. I WANT people desperate and fearful. Fear drives people do things their lazy asses would not otherwise get around to doing.
So things are a bit muddy as to whether ARIN has any jurisdiction in this case.
So things are a bit muddy around ownership, jurisdiction, etc.
Address blocks that are under IANA control can't be bought or sold, just used or relinquished. This is one of the reasons that IANA has been pushing legacy block holders to turn management of their blocks over to them. If you don't then your ownership of that block is unclear and IANA could theoretically just revoke it from you anyway.
Bah, there's an easy solution anyway.... just talk to the creators of CSI and see if you can get in on the 427.x.x.x block.
Quite obvious if you ask me...
Nortel is still in business? And still has an asset worth $74 mil?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
The only reason NAT is a problem for VOIP is because the standard VOIP protocol (SIP) was designed as a peer to peer system. This gives lower costs and slightly better performance but it also makes it very fragile in the case of NAT.
It's perfectly possible to implement VOIP as a traditional client-server protocol (for example IAX) which should work fine with NAT. Downside is that all calls have to be routed via a server but often that is desirable anyway.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
IPv6 around the corner? It's been around the corner for what now, a decade? Do you see anyone use it? I don't. I'm not even certain most ISPs would route it correctly.
So two very wierd things happened in the last three months, which make me believe "this time is different":
1.) At a fairly high level meeting in a DoD acquisition project, for the very first time, I heard someone ask "Is the new version IPv6 compatible?" and get a specific list of incompatibilities back, no less. Not "what is our plan? or when are we implementing?" But "Is it compatible?" with an honest get-well plan, and an answer based on an actual test regime....
2.) I saw the IPv4 spec on a list of "retired standards" for a specific future deployment date.
Its happening slowly, and painfully, but IPv6 is, finally, no shit, happening.
read the parent post... i couldn't be bothered quoting a 1 sentence post directly above mine for reasons that should be obvious.
8.1. Principles
Number resources are nontransferable and are not assignable to any other organization unless ARIN has expressly and in writing approved a request for transfer. ARIN is tasked with making prudent decisions on whether to approve the transfer of number resources
It should be understood that number resources are not 'sold' under ARIN administration. Rather, number resources are assigned to an organization for its exclusive use for the purpose stated in the request, provided the terms of the Registration Services Agreement continue to be met and the stated purpose for the number resources remains the same. Number resources are administered and assigned according to ARIN's published policies.
Number resources are issued, based on justified need, to organizations, not to individuals representing those organizations. Thus, if a company goes out of business, regardless of the reason, the point of contact (POC) listed for the number resource does not have the authority to sell, transfer, assign, or give the number resource to any other person or organization. The POC must notify ARIN if a business fails so the assigned number resources can be returned to the available pool of number resources if a transfer is not requested and justified.
That seems clear to me.
Holy crap, I wish I hadn't blown my mod points. Somebody please mod parent up (and this, my comment, down)
Free Martian Whores!
Assuming ARIN decides they "won't allow this", what power do they have to stop it?
A threat like that made sense when MCI had a contract to run MAE-East and there was some ability to actually order them to blackhole those addresses, but do they have that kind of authority anymore with the size and complexity of the internet? How about the actual ability?
Given the Internet resources Microsoft consumes, the desirability of being well-connected to Microsoft and whatever other various and sundry carrots and/or sticks that Microsoft could bring to bear on ISPs they are connected with, I find it hard to believe that ARIN could unilaterally decide that some block of IPs weren't going to be usable if Microsoft also decided they would use them and announce routes to them.
And if they had the authority, how would they accomplish it, presuming MS was announcing routes to those networks? Does ARIN have some ability to announce black hole routes that must be accepted?
How does anything you just said make Microsoft "not evil". ?
Claiming that others are "more evil" has no bearing on Microsoft at all.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Leading the way to IPv6 by cornering the market on IPv4
Actually in this case the ranters would be correct, there is NO IP V4 shortage there is a serious mismanagement of IP V4 addresses. Something like 30% MAX is what is being used now. The rest? Squatters, dead blocks, companies squatting.
We should treat it like we do phone numbers. You pay? You keep. You don't pay? it goes back in the pool. Imagine how many of them squatting on A blocks would hand them over if they were told its a buck a month per address.
So in this case it really is just horrible mismanagement which could be easily fixed. Instead we'll deal with bullshit like double NATs and horrible kludges, simply because how dare corporations actually have to pay for anything instead of being able to make money off of something that was originally given to them free. I mean how dare they actually have to have management of this resource?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I doubt ARIN will protest the sale of IP blocks, they even have a matching service for companies to have excess allocations to list those allocations for other ARIN members to bid on and purchase.
There are roughly 4 billion public IPv4 addresses, which at $11.25 each values the IPv4 internet at about $45 Billion.
I like your username :)
Microsoft will start packaging their server versions, and maybe home versions, of their windows operating systems with an ip address, and claim that its an integral part of the system whereby they can then force upgrades down your throat via the threat of losing your internet connection.
I can't tell if it is right or not to purchase IPv4 this way, but I can tell for 100% sure that, if they have these IPs, they must have a technical valid reason to use them, otherwise they will go away. I had to suffer the burden of an IP audit once, and the ARIN asks what is the use of each single IP address. Since then, our software can do such IP usage report with a single click, just in case this happens again. My hope is that MS wont be a special case just because they are a big company...
Still bummed that I was one off, but not bummed enough to retry and sign up with another one. You, on the other hand, seem to have done it properly!
I'd respond more thoroughly to this if I knew what the hell you were on about. Right now it just looks like a Bob Dylan song.
The only people that is desireable to are those who wish to intercept and listen in on your calls.
Is there a MAX(uid) counter publically available?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Now all they have to do is to make sure that their desktop product does not really work well with IPv6.
MS have been reasonably pro-v6 in recent years (after a slow start), even introducing technologies like Toredo to make the transition easier.
Now MS will sell your ISP a v4 IP range for the low cost of 30 bucks an address.
Ok... how do you propose to route the traffic to those addresses?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
4. They'll double NAT home user accounts to free up IPv4, and charge extra for a real public IP.
ISPs largely have enough v4 addresses to go round at the moment anyway (I often see quotes from ISPs saying something along the lines of "we won't be implementing v6 in the near future because we have plenty of v4 addresses ourselves"). However, this largely misses the point - in about a month's time, APNIC is going to be the first RIR to essentially run out of addresses (they will hit their final /8 policies which will massively restrict new allocations). Shortly after that, you will start seeing v6-only services start to appear because the *data centres* will be running out of v4 addresses. It doesn't matter how many addresses *you* have, if the services your customers want to access are on v6 then you're going to have to roll out v6 yourself.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
the sales only make sense in big blocks.
in this case, if the company was bankrupt and not even using them(I guess).. then it's a good thing that someone got them out, 11 per ip though.. well, ms has money and maybe the creditors of the bankrupt company then put the money back into circulation.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Does this mean that companies will start selling IP addresses for increasing amounts of money? should I buy a block of 100 as an investment now? A bit like buying up domain names?
No, because a block of 100 addresses (or 128, which is the closest you can get in the form of a /25) isn't routable. Subnets smaller than /22 are generally filtered out of the global BGP tables.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Microsoft's try to extend the time they have to be fully ipv6 compliant ;)
No, this is about companies with large number of IPv4 address space renting them out and then actively obstructing the change over to IPv6 in order to maximise their investment.
So is M$ evil for the investment, unknown. Will they end up being a bunch of arse holes by actively fucking up IPv6 in their software, well that's a wait and see. As it is, typical networking hardware with it's own software suite will override windows configurations unless of course those network hardware companies have large investments in IPv4 address space.
As it is, some will work against IPv6 and some will drive the change over, you can guess the difference between the two camps. Ahh, the benefits of corporate greed to the development of humanity, now all we need to do to make that work, is to consider extinction a benefit.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Most major Swedish ISPs (Telia, etc) say they will start giving everyone both IPv4 and IPv6 in 2013, and drop IPv4 by 2015.
I can believe the first part, I don't believe the second part at all. Because turning off IPv4 *will* break stuff, and Swedes can afford to pay their way to an IPv4 address like most of the Western world. I suspect it will only be cheap internet connections in the third world that'll get a IPv6 only internet.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Chances are that they created a dummy account to find the current max and created a second account seconds later.
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml
We are not going to "abruptly run out of internet addresses" ever.
What will happen is what happens to every good. As the demand for addresses increases, and supply remains flat, addresses will become more and more expensive. You will always be able to get a routable IP address if you are willing to pay the price. Just like you can always get a patch of land if you are willing to pay the price.
Eventually the cost of an IPv4 address will start surpassing the cost of IPv6 (cost as in not being able to reach some site). First for consumers, then for B2B, and probably last will be public websites. The transition to IPv6 will be driven by this. As more and more people adopt IPv6 because it is cheaper and more and more compatible, IPv4 will fade away slowly but surely.
I was not aware that ARIN had control on who has the ip address blocks
You could probably just have two user creation forms up with almost all information filled out. Submit the dummy one, quickly check it's UID, add one to that and submit the second form.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Argh! Next we'll be facing a shortage of Slashdot UIDs...
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
As a former Nortel engineer, I suspect they're all in the 47.X.X.X block, which are registered to Nortel subsidiary Bell Northern Research. A market for IP addresses is a good thing. It will encourage all the folks out there who have more than they need to give some up (because they'd get cash).
I agree, at the moment that's what will happen - and arguably that's the rational response, at the level of the firm if not at the level of the net as a whole. But in the longer term I believe a market for IPv4 addresses will have two consequences:
1. Organisations that are currently sitting on more address space than they need will start to use it more efficiently so they can sell or lease the surplus. That will ease the address space shortage.
2. New organisations, which don't face a large upgrade cost if they choose IPv6, will buy a few IPv4 addresses for public-facing assets such as websites and mailservers that absolutely have to be reachable by IPv4-only customers. Everything else will be done with IPv6. Then a few years down the line, someone within each organisation will ask, "What share of our revenue comes through the IPv4 site, and how much is that site costing us?" Organisations on the margin will start to drop IPv4 support, creating extra pressure for the remaining IPv4-only organisations to upgrade.
Not really. They have Azure. They're planing on needing a lot of Internet routable IP addresses for their cloud users.
An ARIN lookup for Bank of America owned blocks shows that they own 51 Class B blocks! Many of those are used internally! Now don't you think that they could give up a bunch of those and renumber using the 10.* Class A block that they should use for internal networks? And you can bet that there are a lot of other companies that do this as well. We're not running out of IPV4 space! Companies are hogging the blocks and using them inappropriately!
I find that the biggest reason why ipv6 is not being adopted is that we have so much invested in ipv4. Sure we can convert access to ipv4 for http access but there is so many things that just don't work well or have no support such as dnsbl, vnc, various network sharing applications, etc.
The only good solution is to actually get rid of ipv4 rather a slow (and painful) transition. I'm pretty sure this won't happen though so 5 years from now we will probably all still be running ipv4.
The widespread roll-out of IPv6 will occur shortly after the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
If by "shitcast" you are referring to Comcast, I hope you die soon, in as painful a way as possible.
Comcast is the ONLY major consumer ISP in the U.S. that is piloting IPV6.
i.e. in May?
Specifically because they're out of addresses for their Internal network.
Does this mean that companies will start selling IP addresses for increasing amounts of money? should I buy a block of 100 as an investment now? A bit like buying up domain names?
Yes. By this the IPv4 corporate wars have officially began. One /27 will quickly end up costing more than 32 grams of gold and IPs will start being quoted at stock exchanges, just like original installation CDs of Windows XP.
You simply cannot trust Microsoft !
www.maturedatingonline.org
Tough to say, eventually it will become less expensive to transition to IPv6 than to pay exorbitant amounts of money for IPv4 addresses. That cost will vary depending on the organization and the cost and complexity of the transition.