* Andrew Latham > If I can walk around a smallish town and point at 5 businesses like > this its a possible solution. I am not claiming a few /24s will do, I > am claiming that there are many (for larger values of many) companies > like this.
There are certainly several thousands or even millions of unused IPv4 addresses in existence. But reclaiming and redistributing it, which would be a colossal undertaking, would only push back IPv4 depletion by a few months. It's simply not worth the effort. >>> I have already read the news of blackmarket sales of network >>> allocations in Europe. >> >> Interesting. Do you have a link or some other kind of reference? > > I did a quick search and they are easy to find. Many news articles > about Microsoft buying network allocations at auction to set a price > of ~$11USD per IP. One tangent article that I liked was Sure, there's a market all right. However, the well publicised Microsoft/Nortel transfer wasn't a "black market" transfer, it was done in accordance with the ARIN community's policies. Straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.arin.net/about_us/media/releases/20110415.html Such transfers are also permitted by the community's policies in the RIPE region, and the NCC maintains a public list of all such legit/"white" transfers that have taken place: https://www.ripe.net/lir-services/resource-management/ipv4-transfers/table-of-transfers > http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/07/16/ipv4-addresses-now-driving-hosting-deals/ This article mentions a "black market", but it falls short of providing any tangible evidence that it really exists, or to what extent - it appears to me to be more speculation and conjecture than anything else. That said - such speculation may well turn out to be correct, of course, and being involved in the RIPE community I'm genuinely interested in the topic. Therefore I was hoping you'd point me in the direction of "the news of blackmarket sales of network allocations in Europe" you mentioned you have read. Tore
