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<\/h2>\n<\/h2>\nIt shouldn\u2019t be a surprise to anyone that\u00a0global IPv4 address exhaustion<\/a>\u00a0has occurred.\u00a0 The Internet community has been anticipating this for the past 20 years.\u00a0 The\u00a0Internet Assigned Number Authority<\/a>\u00a0(IANA) free pool of IPv4 address space was depleted on February 3, 2011.\u00a0 The five\u00a0Regional Internet Registries<\/a>\u00a0(RIRs) have been exhausting their stores of IPv4 addresses over the past four years.\u00a0APNIC<\/a>\u00a0extinguished its supply of IPv4 addresses on April 15, 2011. RIPE NCC started their\u00a0final stages<\/a>\u00a0of allocations from their remaining \/8 on September 14, 2012.\u00a0LACNIC<\/a>\u00a0announced the exhaustion of its IPv4 address pool on June 10, 2014.\u00a0ARIN<\/a>\u00a0is now below 1\/5th<\/sup>\u00a0of their remaining \/8 as part of their Phase 4 exhaustion policy. At the time this article was written,\u00a0ARIN<\/a>\u00a0only had 14% of a \/8 equivalent remaining.\u00a0 It is anticipated that ARIN will exhaust its supply of IPv4 addresses sometime in the summer of 2015.<\/p>\n Organizations that want to continue to grow their Internet-reachable systems will need to acquire addresses from service providers or find alternative sources of IPv4 addresses.\u00a0 Most organizations have no intention of disabling IPv4, so all companies must consider how they will sustain growth of their Internet-connected systems going forward.<\/p>\n Your organization will continue to use IPv4 for the foreseeable future.\u00a0 It is highly probably that you intend to continue to use IPv4 for at least the next ten years.\u00a0 Organizations may have no choice\u00a0but to acquire more IPv4 addresses as time goes on.\u00a0 Organizations should consider what happens when there are no more addresses to acquire from Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) or\u00a0Internet Service Providers (ISPs).<\/p>\n One option is to move forward with your deployment of IPv6.\u00a0 This is an essential strategy for all organizations that want to preserve their ability to communicate with the broadest Internet population.\u00a0 However, in the short-term,\u00a0what you do with IPv6 will have little impact on your dependence on IPv4<\/a>.\u00a0 That is because your move toward enabling both IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel will not give you the ability to immediately disable IPv4.\u00a0 You will likely run both protocols for an extended period of time.<\/p>\n One possible option is for your organization to obtain IPv4 addresses from organizations other than an RIR or an ISP.\u00a0 There are addressing policies that permit the address transfer process so long as organizations follow the rules of ICANN and the RIRs.\u00a0 For example, the\u00a0American Registry for Internet Numbers<\/a>\u00a0(ARIN)\u00a0Number Resource Policy Manual<\/a>\u00a0(NRPM) has the following sections that describe the process of transfers.<\/p>\n Organizations are free to establish any compensation for their transfer independently.\u00a0 All that ARIN asks is that you work through their\u00a0transfer process<\/a>\u00a0to keep the ownership information updated in their information.\u00a0 There is a transaction fee paid to ARIN for handling and updating of the information related to the transfer process.<\/p>\n There was a well-publicized address transfer that occurred in 2011 when\u00a0Microsoft acquired addresses from the bankrupt Nortel Networks<\/a>.\u00a0 People thought Microsoft was crazy, but they only paid $11 per IP address for a good sized block of addresses.\u00a0 Microsoft received 10 Class B equivalents (\/16s) plus 44 Class C equivalents (\/24s).\u00a0 Microsoft acquired a total of 666,624 IPv4 addresses from bankrupt Nortel Networks for ~$11.25 per address for a total price of $7.5 million.\u00a0 This large transfer established a benchmark in the pricing of public IPv4 addresses.<\/p>\n Another example was when Borders Books went out of business, but sold a \/16 IPv4 address block (65,534 addresses) for ~$12.00 per address for a total price of $786,432.\u00a0 Based on this information, we can approximate the value of IPv4 addresses.<\/p>\n Even governments are getting into the act.\u00a0 We have seen recently that the\u00a0UK government<\/a>\u00a0is selling off unused Internet addresses.\u00a0 The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in the UK has a largely unused \/8 (16,777,216 IP addresses).\u00a0 The UK government recently sold 150,000 addresses to Altibox (a Norwegian firm) for about \u00a3600,000.\u00a0 When we convert pound sterling into U.S. dollars, this comes out to about $6.20 per IP address which is considered to be a good deal for the buyer.<\/p>\n Many organizations (like\u00a0Jump.ro<\/a>) from Romania have been selling IPv4 addresses in the\u00a0RIPE<\/a>\u00a0region.\u00a0 Many of these Romanian IPv4 address blocks are going to organizations in the Middle East who are in need of addresses to continue their Internet growth.<\/p>\n An organization\u2019s finance department\u00a0may consider their public IPv4 addresses as an asset of the company and consider them in their financial analysis, market-valuation, and balance sheet.\u00a0 These public IPv4 addresses are almost like a \u201ctitle\u201d to real property with a defined value and treated like the trading of intellectual property.<\/p>\n If your organization needs public IPv4 addresses, then you would need to find\u00a0a company to buy from that\u00a0has legitimate ownership of public IPv4 addresses.\u00a0 How would you go about finding addresses to buy?\u00a0 Would you use\u00a0eBay<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Craigslist<\/a>?\u00a0 What you need is the\u00a0Match.com<\/a>\u00a0of IPv4 addresses!\u00a0 Can you imagine what the profile descriptions might say?<\/p>\n Luckily, there are organizations that help facilitate this brokerage of IPv4 address transfers.\u00a0 ARIN refers to this as their\u00a0Specified Transfer Listing Service<\/a>\u00a0(STLS).\u00a0 Address broker organizations that agree to follow ARIN\u2019s policies on address transfers are allowed to be added to ARIN\u2019s list of their\u00a0registered STLS facilitators<\/a>.\u00a0 Other registries have similar practices, but their policies may vary slightly. APNIC publishes a list of their\u00a0registered IPv4 brokers<\/a>\u00a0on their web site. RIPE also publishes a list of their\u00a0authorized address brokers<\/a>.<\/p>\n From these lists you can find the companies that are among the largest address brokers and those that are affiliated and authorized to operate with many of the global RIRs. \u00a0The following is a partial alphabetical list of these address broker companies:<\/p>\n Note: There are many other firms that provide these services, and more firms joining this market yearly.\u00a0 This was not intended to be an exhaustive list, but to list those that my research revealed most frequently.<\/p>\n The long-term problem with IPv4 address trading is that larger IPv4 address blocks will get broken up into much\u00a0smaller blocks<\/a>.\u00a0 Each of these smaller blocks may be advertised by their new owners to the Internet via BGP.\u00a0 This would increase the total number of IPv4 routes in the Internet\u2019s \u201cDefault Free Zone\u201d.\u00a0 This means that all routers on the Internet will require more memory to hold the entire BGP database.<\/p>\n Based on these past transactions in the address transfer market we can estimate that the value of a single public IPv4 address today to be somewhere between $10 and $15 per IP address.\u00a0 We might expect to see volume discounts for larger transactions.\u00a0 Larger blocks are less expensive on a per-IP-address basis.\u00a0 In other words, larger blocks are more economical and the larger the block the lower the cost per-IP-address.<\/p>\n Also, just like in the real-world, timing is everything.\u00a0 The later an organization waits to sell their IPv4 addresses, the more money they get for them.\u00a0 The more scarce they are the more valuable they are, but as IPv6 gets more widely deployed (let\u2019s say 60% penetration) then the value of the IPv4 addresses will fall.<\/p>\n Consider the following graph.\u00a0 As time goes on the value of public IPv4 addresses will increase up to a peak.\u00a0 As more organizations start to deploy IPv6, the value of IPv4 addresses will eventually start to fall.<\/p>\n As the price increases over time the following recommendations are natural conclusions:<\/p>\n Over time, IPv4 address may be treated like other scarce resources.\u00a0 Consider what happens when people perceive a shortage of\u00a0Tickle-Me-Elmo Dolls<\/a>, bacon, peanut butter,\u00a0Twinkies<\/a>, rice, or\u00a0Apple Watches<\/a>.\u00a0 Imagine a world much like a\u00a0Mad Max<\/a>\u00a0film where there are violent nomads roaming the vast wasteland in search of a single public IPv4 address.\u00a0 Over-dramatization aside, we can predict that IPv4 addresses will increase in desirability and, as a result, their value will go up.<\/p>\nYou Need IPv4 Addresses for the Near Term and Long Haul<\/h2>\n
Buying More IPv4 Addresses<\/h2>\n
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Address Brokers<\/h2>\n
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Internet Routing Table Impact<\/h2>\n
Price Analysis for Buying or Selling<\/h2>\n
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Conclusions<\/h2>\n