5 ms·

There's a secondary market that is surprisingly lacking in interest. I have a site that brokers large blocks of IPv4 to interested parties, and the most intere

There's a secondary market that is surprisingly lacking in interest. I have a site that brokers large blocks of IPv4 to interested parties, and the most interest I've seen is for a /21. We have a /8 and can not come anywhere close to drumming up interest for it. http://ipv4hub.com http://ipv4hub.com

kjs3 11y ago
Interesting idea, but my unsubstantiated feeling is that there's probably a solid market for sub-class C to maybe /23 or /22, a small but well funded market for blocks bigger than /12 or so, and very, very little in the middle. That is, there's a lot of business use cases where owning a modest sized, routeable network is a potential win (e.g. site redundancy via BGP), a couple of business plans where having a very large numbers of addresses is important (e.g. you're a Something-aaS company, or an ISP/hosting play), but what's the business that needs just 64k addresses? Yes, I know they're out there (I've worked with many), but in my experience many of those are either a) really, really inefficient with their address space or b) are tacking on whatever space they can scrounge because they started out with a too-small allocation. YMMV.
betaby 11y ago
In fact IPv4 transfers are very common in RIPE servin region, there is official pace https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-and-mergers/ipv4-transfers/table-of-transfers https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-... So companies are buying IPv4 space
porjo 11y ago
There is a lot of FUD surrounding this market. Apparently Iran has been buying blocks of IPv4 from Romania, only to discover that the Romanians were continuing to advertise those same blocks after the sale!! See https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA
- MertsA 11y ago
  That's pretty egregious, why the heck did the romanian upstream peers not just drop them after they started obviously highjacking the /23? I mean you have something that is obviously not just some misconfiguration, if you know that one of your peers is intentionally hijacking some prefix why would you be complacent in being a part of their fraud?
ay 11y ago
Hmm, you have an IPv4 /8 that you don't need that you want to sell ? I'm sure with ARIN running out probably tomorrow there would surely be interest soon!
- bluedevil2k 11y ago
  Well, if you have $250M, you can buy it for yourself
  - kjs3 11y ago
    I think I see your problem.
  - ay 11y ago
    $250M for a /8 (2^24) is almost $15 per address, which is 35% higher than the recent public deal [1] (though in RIPE address space), so maybe the time of $16 per IP did not come yet ;-). I guess you've seen that at least in RIPE the transfers are alive and well: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/wilhelm/ipv4-transfers-in-the-ripe-ncc-service-region https://labs.ripe.net/Members/wilhelm/ipv4-transfers-in-the-... And ARIN just the other day put up for discussion the simplifications in transfer [2], so with the impending scraping the bottom of the barrel (today morning only /23s and /24s left, in total less than 200000 addresses) it should liven up. OTOH the higher the price per Legacy IP goes, the more incentive folks have to do IPv6. There's a odd satisfaction in having the lots "I told you so" moments in the past half a year or so, although I feel sad for folks who made the life for themselves more difficult than it should've been by pretending the IPv6 not to be a thing. Especially for the folks on HN doing startups: whereas before you could have gotten away with temporarily glitches in IPv6 connectivity when it was available with 2% users, today when you enable IPv6, 1 out of 5 users in the US will use it [3] - and predominantly mobile [4] - the US is leading. Not much time for learning on the job now! Luckily Cloudflare [5] and Akamai offer at least a temporary patch by frontending the site with IPv6 and providing the X-Forwarded-For. Later on, the use of CGN on IPv4 and NAT64 to reach the legacy IP sites will increase - now think of all these precious analytics they are missing because of CGNs hiding the individual users... Anyway a /8 could become more valuable when the IPv4 routing table grows bad enough that the operators start to filter the routes more aggressively. This is the fun part in the whole game to catch the moment to cash out. Sorry, this turned out to be quite a bit longer and more offtopic than I wanted, but hopefully might help some. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32826353 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32826353 [2] https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2015_7.html https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2015_7.html [3] http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/index.php?option=all http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/index.php?option=all [4] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ [5] https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6 https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6

kjs3 11y ago

Interesting idea, but my unsubstantiated feeling is that there's probably a solid market for sub-class C to maybe /23 or /22, a small but well funded market for blocks bigger than /12 or so, and very, very little in the middle. That is, there's a lot of business use cases where owning a modest sized, routeable network is a potential win (e.g. site redundancy via BGP), a couple of business plans where having a very large numbers of addresses is important (e.g. you're a Something-aaS company, or an ISP/hosting play), but what's the business that needs just 64k addresses? Yes, I know they're out there (I've worked with many), but in my experience many of those are either a) really, really inefficient with their address space or b) are tacking on whatever space they can scrounge because they started out with a too-small allocation. YMMV.

betaby 11y ago

In fact IPv4 transfers are very common in RIPE servin region, there is official pace https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-and-mergers/ipv4-transfers/table-of-transfers https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-... So companies are buying IPv4 space

porjo 11y ago

There is a lot of FUD surrounding this market. Apparently Iran has been buying blocks of IPv4 from Romania, only to discover that the Romanians were continuing to advertise those same blocks after the sale!! See https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA https://youtu.be/Jn5ztZSigHA

MertsA 11y ago
That's pretty egregious, why the heck did the romanian upstream peers not just drop them after they started obviously highjacking the /23? I mean you have something that is obviously not just some misconfiguration, if you know that one of your peers is intentionally hijacking some prefix why would you be complacent in being a part of their fraud?

ay 11y ago

Hmm, you have an IPv4 /8 that you don't need that you want to sell ? I'm sure with ARIN running out probably tomorrow there would surely be interest soon!

bluedevil2k 11y ago
Well, if you have $250M, you can buy it for yourself
- kjs3 11y ago
  I think I see your problem.
- ay 11y ago
  $250M for a /8 (2^24) is almost $15 per address, which is 35% higher than the recent public deal [1] (though in RIPE address space), so maybe the time of $16 per IP did not come yet ;-). I guess you've seen that at least in RIPE the transfers are alive and well: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/wilhelm/ipv4-transfers-in-the-ripe-ncc-service-region https://labs.ripe.net/Members/wilhelm/ipv4-transfers-in-the-... And ARIN just the other day put up for discussion the simplifications in transfer [2], so with the impending scraping the bottom of the barrel (today morning only /23s and /24s left, in total less than 200000 addresses) it should liven up. OTOH the higher the price per Legacy IP goes, the more incentive folks have to do IPv6. There's a odd satisfaction in having the lots "I told you so" moments in the past half a year or so, although I feel sad for folks who made the life for themselves more difficult than it should've been by pretending the IPv6 not to be a thing. Especially for the folks on HN doing startups: whereas before you could have gotten away with temporarily glitches in IPv6 connectivity when it was available with 2% users, today when you enable IPv6, 1 out of 5 users in the US will use it [3] - and predominantly mobile [4] - the US is leading. Not much time for learning on the job now! Luckily Cloudflare [5] and Akamai offer at least a temporary patch by frontending the site with IPv6 and providing the X-Forwarded-For. Later on, the use of CGN on IPv4 and NAT64 to reach the legacy IP sites will increase - now think of all these precious analytics they are missing because of CGNs hiding the individual users... Anyway a /8 could become more valuable when the IPv4 routing table grows bad enough that the operators start to filter the routes more aggressively. This is the fun part in the whole game to catch the moment to cash out. Sorry, this turned out to be quite a bit longer and more offtopic than I wanted, but hopefully might help some. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32826353 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32826353 [2] https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2015_7.html https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2015_7.html [3] http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/index.php?option=all http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/index.php?option=all [4] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ [5] https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6 https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6