Microsoft has offered to pay $7.5m (£4.7m) for net addresses from bankrupt telecoms firm Nortel.
The 666,624 IP version 4 (IPv4) net addresses were put up for auction as part of the sell-off of Nortel's assets.
Blocks of IPv4 are valuable because the pool of this generation of address is close to running dry. It was predicted that a market in IPv4 would appear among companies facing a costly migration to the newer IPv6.
Details of the sale were contained in papers filed to a Delaware bankruptcy court and show that Microsoft's bid was the highest of the 80 firms asked if they wanted to make an offer for the IP addresses. The deal is yet to be approved by that court and anyone who objects to it can file their comments before 4 April.
That's over $15 per IP address!! I have a Class C allocation in Leaseweb, that I've had since 2004, but with me gradually moving out of LW, I'm using less than 50 now haha!! They can buy them off me for $3000 if they want lmao!!
I was thinking about relinquishing them a year ago, and transferring to my other locations in BlueSquare/Fortess ITX completely, now I know I'm going to hold onto them!
On a more serious note, I don't really understand why the industry never changed over to IPv6 sooner, even when I bought that Class C back in 2004, there was growing concerns over the future availability of IPv4, I guess people just saw it as something that was too far in the future... well it's creeping up now, isnt it!
And its becoming increasing hard to justify usage of IP addresses, I was recently advised by my NOC to throw an SSL on one, to be eligible for two, to use for DNS, as ARIN would not accept 2x NS as justification for using 2x IP's.
And no, my infrastructure isn't quite ready for IPv6 either.
BBC News Report
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