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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.''"
A bust has been made in the digital district of NYC. Agent Friedeggs and his partner, Copbot 4X, have a perp handcuffed in the backseat of their cruiser that is now being piloted by Google's driving software to take him back to the precinct where he'll be booked.
... " He cuts himself off as a warning light goes off on Copbot's torso. "Jesus H. Tesla, they've hacked the GPS signal to our car!" Copbot morphs into a go a cart as Agent Friedeggs draws his Taser and slides across its hood. Cheesy synth horns flair up over wakka guitars as their silent electric motor spins them off down the street.
They approach the criminal's ancient Cadillac CTS and open the trunk. Inside is a briefcase packed with millions of little strips of white paper, each bearing an IPv4 address. Copbot 4X applies a small strip of multipurpose adhesive to his index finger with his mouth and reaches down to snag one of the strips. As he feeds it into his mouth and the ping trace times out he emits a satisfied Artoo Detoo whistle. "It's pure," he confirms as Friedeggs nods satisfactorily.
"You know, I think we're finally gonna catch these bastards. These addresses belong on display in the Guggenheim, not
My work here is dung.
If it's a lease, why can't you sublease the remaining months on your lease of an address range?
In this case, ARIN, RIPE, or APNIC.
ford could've averted their recent financial woes by auctioning off their 16 million ip addresses http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-19-0-0-0-1
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"
That's nothing. Wait until you see what happens when the clock rolls around on midnight on Dec 31st, 1999.
Better known as 318230.
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.
I completely agree... anyone who complains about IPv6 is a troll.. 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf is incredibly easy to remember.
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
You cannot own an address, you lease it.
I can. But that's because I'm not a penniless hippie. Wait... that's something else.
It seems that we have been running out of addresses for 10 years or something and everyone has been talking about moving to IPv6 since the late ninteties ? I am sure there is a limited range of numbers and the issue is real but also seems like fodder for sensationalist tech journal articles.
You are 100% correct. It was clear then and it is clear now how it will play out. All it takes is just a little analytic thinking: We will never run out of IPv4 addresses. Yes, you read it right: NEVER.
What will happen is that as supply of IPv4 remains flat, and demand for it goes up, supply and demand laws kick in, and the price of an IPv4 address goes up. As prices go up, people sitting on unused addresses will start selling them, and people that need them will start buying them (This article is a good example). So the market will naturally redistribute IPv4 addresses from wasteful uses to more productive uses. This will also mean that there will ALWAYS be an IPv4 address for you to purchase if you want to pay the price, that is why I say we will never run out of IPv4 addresses.
There will be a point, where cost of an IPv4 address will be greater than the cost of switching to IPv6. This threshold will start happening for a few sectors first. My guess is Business to Business applications and back office services first. At some point cell phones too since there are so many. At some point, ISP will start offering an IPv6 only plan with some backward compatible proxy which would be cheaper than IPv4 plan for consumers with limitations. Web sites will want to be optimized for these consumers, and will start offering their content in both protocols. This will make IPv6 switch less and less costly as more content is available for it. Once enough consumers are in IPv6, web sites will start ignoring IPv4 altogether to save the cost of an IPv4 address.
Eventually, enough momentum will be gained by IPv6 that IPv4 will go the way of the typewriter, where it is available, but nobody cares.
This will be a smooth transition, no crisis, no armagedon, just free market pushing the change slowly and efficiently. This process will take years. No one is or should be in a rush to switch or panic, just switch when it is cost effective to do so.
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'.
For all intents and purposes the addresses that my company registered in the early 90's are ours. If we want to sell them, there's nothing within ARIN's Number Resource Policy Manual that says that cannot sell all or any part of our address space to anybody else. The transfer has to be done through ARIN and it has to be a group within ARIN's zone, but if we charge for it, ARIN doesn't care.
Does "fe80::202:b3ff:fe1e:8329" actually stand for an IP address of "fe80:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329" or does it stand for "fe80:0000:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e with port 8329"?
The former, your ip:port example would be [fe80::202:b3ff:fe1e]:8329
RFC3986
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?