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Next Generation MITnet
- mabbo 10y ago> David Clark, a Senior Research Scientist at our Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) quickly saw the importance of these addresses and requested an early allocation of them, both to support research and eventually to support all of computing at MIT. We hold a block of 16 million IPv4 addresses. Smart man. Anyone got a guess as to how much money this sale might raise?
- mnx 10y agobased on [1], prices seem to hover around 10-15$/ip. So, 80 million maybe? [1]: https://ipv4marketgroup.com/broker-services/buy/ https://ipv4marketgroup.com/broker-services/buy/
- petters 10y agoMicrosoft charges $0.004/h for a static IP. That's $35 annually and $280M/year for 8 million addresses. So perhaps the sale will give MIT a billion?
- chatmasta 10y agoThey're selling the addresses, not renting them.
- matheweis 10y agoThis was (indirectly) on HN yesterday... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854 I'm seeing numbers between $10-$20 per IP, but this is also probably a bulk sale so there might be a discount... Say +/- $250 million? Perfect time to sell them off as the IPv4 shortage tightens and IPv6 hasn't reached critical mass yet.
- OJFord 10y ago> but this is also probably a bulk sale so there might be a discount I was thinking the opposite - isn't the block (or a sub-block) worth more in bulk than its constituent addresses? In the same way that a complete collection of N Foobars has more value to a Foobar collector than N times the average value of a collectable Foobar.
- copperx 10y agoIs there any way that I could buy an IP from the MIT address block? As a memento.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bognition 10y agoIt was only a matter of time before this happened, I've been trying to come up with ballpark estimates as to how much they could have sold the /9 for but I can't seem to find too many numbers on how much a block of ip address actually costs.
- erentz 10y ago$11-15 per IP and that was what I was seeing three years ago. So if that lower end is still valid (would seem unlikely) then something over $90 million.
- AdamN 10y agoThey should do the responsible thing and give it to ARIN. They don't 'own' the IPs and really have no right to sell them. With that said, they basically built the Internet so I won't hold it against them.
- icedchai 10y agoThey have a pre-ARIN allocation, so the rules are different. I also have a pre-ARIN allocation (only a /24 though.)
- geofft 10y agoARIN doesn't 'own' the IPs either. (The fact that MIT refused to recognize ARIN's rights over the IP space was historically why ARIN never gave MIT an IPv6 prefix, or so I hear....)
- icedchai 10y agoI've never signed the legacy registration agreement for my IP space, either. I've had it since 1993, before ARIN existed.
- stingraycharles 10y agoWhat did you do with it ?
- icedchai 10y agoI have it routed to a rack at a local datacenter. I use it for hosting personal projects, etc.
- artursapek 10y agoWow, they only use 2 million out of the 16 million addresses in their stockpile? It would be interesting to be able to trade IPv4 addresses on an exchange.
- lgierth 10y agoThere's stuff like http://www.ipv4auctions.com/ http://www.ipv4auctions.com/ We recently bought a /24 for ~$4k and now use it with Vultr's BGP support.
- shif 10y agoYou should see the other companies that hold /8's apple for example owns 17.0.0.0/8 and barely uses any of their 16 million addresses
- danielvf 10y ago" Our intention is not only to advance our own agenda, but to help shape the future of the on-line world. For instance, non-technical issues are now shaping the future of the Internet as much as, if not more than, technical innovation." Did they just say they were going to be funding politics and activism with most of the money?
- notacoward 10y agoNo. They're more likely to be talking about social-science research, and tools to apply that research. How about better tools to understand public sentiment, to analyze or sort content, to facilitate positive online interaction? How those tools are used might be political, but the science and technology behind them are not.
- simonster 10y agoPrevious discussion (where I originally posted this gist): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854
- 6d6b73 10y agoSo they knew that IPv4 address space is nearing exhaustion, and they that they are using only 2 mln out of 16 mln addresses yet they decided to wait until now? And instead of returning the addresses (like Stanford did) they want to sell them?
- notacoward 10y agoSort of reflects on MIT's business school (Sloan) vs. Stanford's, I'd say.
- Tarrosion 10y agoWhy business schools rather than institutes as a whole, bureaucratic structure, beliefs of particular powerful people on campus, etc.? I'm not sure what this comparison has to do with Sloan and GSB.
- notacoward 10y agoMIT found a way to monetize something that Stanford had given away for free. Not saying it's right, but it's a business decision. Also, it's a joke. People seem to be taking it rather seriously, which says more about their levels of (in)security than anything.
- ghaff 10y agoWhy not sell them? - It's not clear to me who benefits from just giving IP addresses back to ARIN. I guess it means everyone (presumably mostly telcos and cloud providers) get IP addresses a little bit cheaper. - I'm not sure why MIT is under some special obligation to give back their old, pre-ARIN addresses that they got in the early days of the Internet relative to the variety of corporations who still own the blocks from the same regime including Halliburton for example.
- mherdeg 10y agoAssuming Amazon paid them money for the IP addresses (which are now allocated for EC2 use) it's kind of a shame. A more forward-thinking deal would have bartered for, say, a lifetime allocation of Amazon Web Services credit. For the past 5-10 years timeshare computing has grown in popularity again, this time on third-parties' computers. Given this reality and the changes it implies for MITnet -- lots of students and staff spin up "a server" to do experiments that they don't want to host on local physical machines -- it would have been smart for MIT to negotiate some perpetual timeshare credit with Amazon rather than just straight-up cash. Then (my theory continues) MIT could have allotted some of its information-processing credit for research use and some for student use. They could have given each student a basic quota with the vendor, and reserved some additional information-processing for student projects. And instead of hiring some full-time staffer to coordinate the distribution of timeshare credit to worthy projects ("I need 100 hours of EC2 c4.large for my thesis") they could have done something really clever and asked students themselves to divvy up the credit via an advisory organization of technically minded folks. Imagine that -- MIT could have helped support some kind of student information processing board …
- jrgv 10y agoMoney that is put into an endowment fund effectively is a lifetime credit for anything.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ohitsdom 10y ago> A more forward-thinking deal would have bartered for, say, a lifetime allocation of Amazon Web Services credit. You'd prefer an unlimited gift card over cash? Amazon is a top provider in cloud services now, but you'd be betting a lot on them in the future and essentially locked into their platform (if you wanted to get fair value for the IP addresses). Cash is a much safer deal, and as noted they will invest it anyway.
- sly010 10y agoWon't this just delay the adoption of IPv6?
- agumonkey 10y agoDepends, some who cant migrate will keep living on these, and maybe later switch. Maybe even helping those migrating to do so by ensuring future customers in a while.
- wmf 10y agoNo, because adoption of IPv6 is limited by other factors (budget, laziness, bugs, etc.) than IPv4 scarcity.
- pmarreck 10y agoThis has been said many times in many places before, but the decision not to design IPv6 such that it is backwards-compatible with IPv4 is one of the worst technical decisions ever made, at least when it comes to organically adopting a new standard. The second worst decision would be not auctioning off their 16 million IPv4 addresses, right now, probably at peak value of around $250 million.
- _wmd 10y agoThere are a whole host of standards to support interoperability between v4-only->v6, v4/v6->v4, v6-only->v4 addressing. I know it doesn't answer your complaint, but really there is little "backwards compatible" to be done with 32 bits of address + 16 bits of port that doesn't look like another version of NAT, and we all know how much the tech community loves to hate on NAT. The transition hasn't really been that bad, it's picking up pace precisely because there is increasingly valuable commercial logic in doing so (v4 addresses cost a fortune, as you noted!) I've been surprised on a number of occasions recently to notice I've been communicating by v6 from public wifi, other peoples' homes, etc. Progress is slow but it is also sure. In the UK, once BT flick the switch on their home offerings, there will be very few significant sources of v4 traffic left in the UK still awaiting transition
- geofft 10y ago> we all know how much the tech community loves to hate on NAT This, I think, is the unpopular but true reason the IPv6 transition has been slow. It ties together two changes, "get rid of IPv4" and "get rid of NAT", and making a business case for doing both of those simultaneously is very hard. Lots of people understand NAT. Lots of vendors understand NAT. Lots of managers understand NAT. ("NAT", of course, means "PAT with implicit firewall," but "NAT" is the term people use.) You can get the same security and privacy benefits and an equally good or even better design without NAT, but that's not what people are used to. If IPv6 had been a straightforward extension of IPv4 to 128 bits instead of a bunch of cool and reasonable and backwards-incompatible ideas, the transition would probably be done already. The tradeoff, of course, is we'd still be on the same quality of architecture we have on IPv4.