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Sales of Unused IPv4 Addresses Gaining Steam
netbuzz writes "A growing number of U.S. carriers and enterprises are hedging their bets on IPv6 by purchasing blocks of unused IPv4 addresses through official channels or behind-the-scenes deals. There is certainly no shortage of stock, as these address brokers have blocks available that range from 65,000 to more than a million IPv4 addresses. And it's not just large companies and institutions benefiting, as one attorney who's involved in the market says he represents a woman who came into possession of a block of IPv4 address in the early '90s and now, 'She's in her 70s, and she's going to have a windfall.''"
If it's a lease, why can't you sublease the remaining months on your lease of an address range?
Started out strong. I like the reference to oil. That could have been modded up funny, until that bullcrap about keeping the dot formatting. Are you really afraid of colons instead of dots? Or is it the hexidecimal numbers that frighten you? IPv6 solves more issues than just IP address exhaustion... autoconfiguration, routing, etc. It's going to happen and you'll have to crack a book. Deal with it.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Sure, windfall now, but next month when IPv6 day comes and all the IPv6 sites stay lit, they'll be worth a rapidly diminishing amount.
ArsTechnica has a nice piece about IPv6 and why it's not going to be such a disaster thing after all, add to that the IPv6-capable home routers that are actually being made (at last!) and the ISPs who are rolling out IPv6 networking to their customers... and it's all looking rosy.
What utter and serious bullshit.
What else do you propose?
IPv4 address for regular allocation* have run out at the IANA and APNIC and will soon run out at RIPE and ARIN too.
Meanwhile IPv6 is still in it's infancy with the majority of end users not having access to the IPv6 internet. So if you want to run a public server it needs to have a v4 address.
Under these circumstances a market means that IPv4 address gradually rise in value and as that happens people will re-evalute what applications really need a public V4 address. Lack of a market means that addresses stay where they are even if they could be more lucrative elsewhere stifiling choice.
You cannot own an address, you lease it.
That is true for modern allocations, with older allocations the status is less clear.
But even for modern allocations the RIRs are coming round to the realisation that allowing some form of sales** is a good idea as part of managing the twilight years of IPv4. The alternative is that you will only be able to buy usable hosting services from providers who happen to have a pool of addresses already (most likely hosting providers who are also end-luser ISPs and so have addresses they can recover using ISP level NAT).
* There are still a few held back for special allocations.
** IIRC arin and ripe are requiring the recipiants of such sales to justify their address use to reduce hoarding.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Several oil rigs would have gone into shutdown had there not been an update to the timestamping of data before the change-over.
That nothing happens is not a case of 'there was no problem' it is a case of 'almost all shit got fixed'.
Can you HONESTLY say that if someone showed you a pile of IP V6 addresses and said "One of these has a problem in either the address or the subnet" you could just pick it out on the fly?
Don't we have, like, computers, that do that kind of thing?