Microsoft pays Nortel $7.5 million for IPv4 addresses

In a Network World article today it was announced that Microsoft offered to pay Nortel $7.5 million for 666,624 legacy IPv4 addresses. The sale is pending approval by U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware as part of Nortel's Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

It may just be the start of things to come as we've run out of IPv4 address space as previously mentioned in this blog. If you haven't started your migration to IPv6, its definitely time to start the investigation.

This sale is reportedly the first publicly disclosed large-scale sale of IPv4 addresses since ICANN announced they had run out of address blocks. If the court approves the sale on April 26, these 666K-plus addresses will selling for $11.25 per address. Network World estimates that's more than the going rate for to register a .com domain name, which these days can be had for as little as $7.50.

Additional information from Network World:

Nortel filed for Chapter 11 on On January 14, 2009. In November, it realized its block of legacy IPv4 addresses might be worth something to its debtors and it hired Addrex, a stealthy broker of IPv4 addresses, to find a buyer. Addrex began shopping around and, in early December, asked eighty potential purchasers if they were interested. Of these, 14 expressed interest and seven actually submitted bids for all or some of the addresses, according to the court documents. Obviously, Microsoft walked with the prize for being the highest bidder.

Interestingly, those in the IP-address-assigning business seem to be busy launching brokering sites so that deals like this one can grow commonplace. The so-called "aftermarket" for IPv4 addresses is expected to heat up in about six months, as large network providers feel the pressure of their dwindling IPv4 address supply, John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers told Government Computer News.

Just a reminder for those of you that don't know where to begin with your IPv6 migration, that there are more tools announced every day to help. Blue Coat, the proxy vendor announced early on their proxy would do IPv4 to IPv6 proxying, and would be a useful migration tool. Brocade announced this week that their switches would do something similar.

So there are tools out there, and no reason not to get started with IPv6