IPv4 addresses have always had a value, though the price for them has always (officially at least), been $0, though ISPs often charged administration fees to people who applied for small chunks of them.

Now that IPv4 addresses have all but run out, and with the news that Microsoft has bought a large chunk of IP addresses from the bankrupt Nortel at a price of $11.25 per IP, the first question that entered my head was “How high will the price go as the addresses get rarer?”.

There’s 10,000s of organisations that each have a small chunk of IP addresses directly assigned to them, and millions with 1 or more assigned via an ISP. Each one of those organisations should now realise that the IP address has both a value and a market price, and Universities and corporations that joined the Internet early on, with their huge and under-utilised IP address ranges, will surely be looking at what they can do with them.

A follow on from this is that organisations can now put an internal cost on assigning each user an individual IPv4 address, rather than an IPv6 address, and perhaps start to justify the cost of upgrading their network. If an ISP has 1 million ADSL subscribers online all the time, that’s millions of dollars of IPv4 assets in use, and realistically not needed, that could be migrated to IPv6 then sold.