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?"

Comments

Re:Does this mean IPv4 addresses will sell like DN

[xiando]

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.

Re:Rent IP Addresses

[afidel]

No organization should ever need more than a few class Cs of publicly routable IP space.

You're thinking backwards, every endpoint should ideally have a public IP, NAT breaks the end to end model and makes software much more difficult to write.