Microsoft buys IPv4 addresses from Nortel
Microsoft has bought a batch of more than 600,000 IPv4 addresses from the bankrupt Nortel. The price? A cool $7.5 million.
It was only a few weeks ago that ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) announced it had distributed the last remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses. The supply will now start running down, and is expected to be totally out sometime later this year. There were fears expressed at the time of some kind of black (or at least gray) market for IPv4 addresses popping up, and those fears seem to have already been realized.
As you may have guessed from the title of the article Microsoft and Nortel are the companies involved. Telecoms firm Nortel went bust in 2009, with its gradual liquidation having been happening ever since. Included in the company’s assets are 666,624 IPv4 addresses, and 80 companies were offered the chance to buy these around a year ago.
According to Delaware bankruptcy court documents released this week Microsoft was the highest bidder, offering to pay a whopping $7.5 million for the IPv4 addresses. Assuming no one objects to the deal the court will give its approval and the IPv4 addresses will switch from Nortel to Microsoft; 470,016 instantly, the other 196,608 as former Nortel customers move to new companies.
For those who don’t know, IP addresses are the numbers given to all devices so they can be identified on the Internet. IPv4 allows for 4.3 billion devices and has already been superseded by IPv6, which has the capacity for in excess of 3 undecillion numbers (3 with 38 zeros). However, because of the cost of migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 some companies are clearly keen to grab on to as many of the out-of-date variety as possible. Microsoft included.
According to The Register the price paid by Microsoft implies the potential market for IPv4 addresses totals around $48.3 billion. Not bad for what are essentially routing numbers which were once doled out for free.
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