Sales of Unused IPv4 Addresses Gaining Steam 329
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.''"
class a blocks (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [arin.net]
Regulation (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't normally support regulation and I am not sure I'd vote for this idea if asked to myself but I want to put it out there anyway.
What if we ban, that is right ban, the use ipv4 on publicly accessible networks after say 2018. Make it illegal to route ip4v addressed packet for a third party. This would force the move to ipv6. Which I think is good for freedom and the little guy. Yes that is right a forced migration is good for the little guy.
Its big business that has interests in keeping everyone on IPv4 and its actually big business who have the bigger investment in ipv4 only gear. The little guy can afford migrate.
What this is really about is ipv4 implies NAT. NAT implies third party brokers, which imply track ability, and opportunities to create digital toll booths. You can't just send files directly to each other; oh no they have be posted to some file sharing site so they can show you adds and the NSA has a good opportunity to data mine.
The key to IPv6 (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the key to transitioning to IPv6. People will transition to IPv6 as costs increase for IPv4. When transitioning to IPv6 is cheaper than buying IPv4 addresses, the change will come quickly.
Hopefully people will observe this and learn how change happens. It doesn't happen because you wish it would. It doesn't happen because you know The Right Way for everyone to manage their lives or their businesses or their operations. It is driven by tangible benefits, not ideology.
(Magically, this results in people seeing tangible benefits from their decisions rather than absorbing "unexpected" costs related to idealistic or mandatory early adoption.)
Re:IPv4 forever? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Exactly why we don't need IPv6 (Score:4, Interesting)
DHCPv6 is not the only way to do it, so mandating it is kind of silly
With zeroconf and IPv6 autoconfig, you don't actually need to run a DHCP server at all.