150,000 Address sold already for £600,000
IPv4 addresses are worth more than before as companies are not yet using IPv6 because of technical incompatibilities. Altibox have bought 150,000 Address for £600,000. If the government decides to sell all unused address they could get up to £15m.
Government periodically reviews all its assets to consider their financial value, including options to release income from those that are not used to their fullest potential.
“The scope of the value of these assets is commercially sensitive and protected by standard legal confidentiality agreements.
This period of discovery is a useful one to see what value we have hidden in our existing technology. We may be able to better use our network assets, like addresses, both by freeing them up for someone else to use, and by releasing some value from things we aren’t using to their fullest potential.
Doug Madory, Directory of Internet Analysis at Dyn, had that “People typically try to deal with addresses in contiguous blocks to keep the binary math from getting unwieldy leading to errors”.
As you slice it thinly the number of routes gets larger and larger and it’s computationally expensive to look up where each packet has to go… Delays in transferring ownership had already led to some data going astray.
Andrew de la Haye, chief operating officer of the Ripe agency said:
We see this as a transition period… some European companies were analysing how they use IPv4 as a way to help them move to the larger addressing system… It’s a bit early to say but I have spoken to a few of our members and they are freeing up IPv4 address spaces to fund their IPv6 migration,” he said. “The long-term strategy should be IPv6.
