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Zen selling 65,536 IPv4 addresses - £44 per address

£44 per address seems…quite high.

What’s the going ‘guide price’ for wholesale v4 address blocks these days?

Sound like Zen want to free up some otherwise dead capital.
Free money, it's pretty incredible.
They should be legally obliged to return them of not needed.
There are businesses unable to bootstrap because this resource is nowadays unavailable.
 
Anyone know how many customers they have? and isn't against RIPE rules to sell IP space?
 
Maybe Zen have timed their run wrong. AltNets aren't exactly flush with spare cash at the moment. Though they do need some v4's
They don't need to sell to altnets. There are plenty of big players like Amazon and Microsoft who are hoovering up IP addresses for use in their cloud services.

Of course, the longer Zen hold out, the higher the price will go. But they have to cash in at some point.

We seem to be a long way from the tipping point where IPv4 addresses are no longer in demand. This will only happen when:
1. The vast majority of the content on the Internet is reachable on IPv6; and
2. The vast majority of users on the Internet have IPv6 access

(1) is held up by huge corporate laggards like the BBC (who used to be technical leaders back in the 20th century). (2) is held up by ISP laggards like Talktalk and Plusnet.

At one point there was talk of China switching off IPv4. If they do, that may force the content providers to start enabling IPv6 access, or lose about 1/5th of the planet.
 
They don't need to sell to altnets. There are plenty of big players like Amazon and Microsoft who are hoovering up IP addresses for use in their cloud services.

Of course, the longer Zen hold out, the higher the price will go. But they have to cash in at some point.

We seem to be a long way from the tipping point where IPv4 addresses are no longer in demand. This will only happen when:
1. The vast majority of the content on the Internet is reachable on IPv6; and
2. The vast majority of users on the Internet have IPv6 access

(1) is held up by huge corporate laggards like the BBC (who used to be technical leaders back in the 20th century). (2) is held up by ISP laggards like Talktalk and Plusnet.

At one point there was talk of China switching off IPv4. If they do, that may force the content providers to start enabling IPv6 access, or lose about 1/5th of the planet.

The situation probably couldnt be any worse than it is now. Its like the perfect storm to keep the v4 train going.

Imagine e.g. if ARIN and co, maintained control of these addresses, forbid trading, profiting from them etc. and instead said, if you run out roll out IPv6, even if it means you single stacked IPv6. Eventually a trigger would be forced due to a critical shortage and then would have a domino effect of broadband ISPs rolling out IPv6, which in turn would wake up the likes of the BBC.

Was crazy that once they knew the IP situation was critical ARIN and co did not enforce IPv6 rollout as a prerequisite to issuing further ranges. Someone did tell me, they sort of tried and some organisations like the BBC did on a few end points, but that should have not been enough.
 
If Zen want to put a good spin on this and get some good PR from it they could say we are doing this to make a concerted effort into IPv6.
 
Imagine e.g. if ARIN and co, maintained control of these addresses, forbid trading, profiting from them etc. and instead said, if you run out roll out IPv6, even if it means you single stacked IPv6.
At the access ISP (end user) side, that can't work. Imagine you signed up with an ISP, and found you couldn't reach most sites on the Internet. You'd rightly say it was broken, and move to a different ISP - one which has some IPv4.

At the content provider side (e.g. BBC), there is no IPv4 shortage. Content providers have been sharing IPv4 addresses for years, via virtual hosting, reverse proxies etc. Any website behind a CDN like Cloudflare or Akamai is sharing their IP addresses.

In any case, the regional registries like ARIN, RIPE etc have no actual power. They cannot stop networks from announcing whatever routes they like to each other.

I do think that the only way to get out of this logjam *is* to deploy IPv6-only access networks, but these still need NAT64 to reach the rest of the Internet. This means the ISP itself needs to provide NAT64, which is pretty much the same as CGN.

Maybe one day the big CDNs like Google and Cloudflare will provide a public NAT64 service, like they provide public DNS resolvers today. Effectively they'd stick the whole IPv4 Internet behind one great big reverse proxy.
 
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Well I didnt mean forbid CGNAT and stuff, so mistake on my part, but I meant they wouldnt be able to do normal dual stack or single stacked IPv4.

If nothing is done to kind of push things into place, I can see us been in the same position in a decade, those short using CGNAT whilst charging a premium for normal IPv4, those comfy carrying on as they are.
 
At one point there was talk of China switching off IPv4. If they do, that may force the content providers to start enabling IPv6 access, or lose about 1/5th of the planet.
China's made good progress with IPv6 though - they've mandated all online services provide IPv6 access, most apps in China will have a little IPv6 flag or icon to indicate this when you open it. I imagine if it was actually to get shut off any time soon, there likely wouldn't be too much of an issue. Plus every ISP hands out IPv6 addresses without issues.
 
They don't need to sell to altnets. There are plenty of big players like Amazon and Microsoft who are hoovering up IP addresses for use in their cloud services.

Of course, the longer Zen hold out, the higher the price will go. But they have to cash in at some point.

We seem to be a long way from the tipping point where IPv4 addresses are no longer in demand. This will only happen when:
1. The vast majority of the content on the Internet is reachable on IPv6; and
2. The vast majority of users on the Internet have IPv6 access

(1) is held up by huge corporate laggards like the BBC (who used to be technical leaders back in the 20th century). (2) is held up by ISP laggards like Talktalk and Plusnet.

At one point there was talk of China switching off IPv4. If they do, that may force the content providers to start enabling IPv6 access, or lose about 1/5th of the planet.
Of course Zen are free to sell them to the highest bidder. That would be a bit of shame to let them go to Amazon et all, when domestic service providers could really do with them, but hey ho its the British way to sell your silver (and gold!!) to foreigners and then winge and moan...😎🤣
 
Of course Zen are free to sell them to the highest bidder. That would be a bit of shame to let them go to Amazon et all, when domestic service providers could really do with them, but hey ho its the British way to sell your silver (and gold!!) to foreigners and then winge and moan...😎🤣
In any case, the (non-wholesale) Altnets are direct competitors to Zen and other long-established ISPs. It's arguably in Zen's interest to make life difficult for them.
 
Of course Zen are free to sell them to the highest bidder. That would be a bit of shame to let them go to Amazon et all, when domestic service providers could really do with them, but hey ho its the British way to sell your silver (and gold!!) to foreigners and then winge and moan...😎🤣
My Zen IP in the 51.155.0.0/16 range is one that was originally allocated to the Department for Work and Pensions - it's already been sold by the government to Zen...!
 
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Of course Zen are free to sell them to the highest bidder.

I wish the RIRs, or IANA for that matter had some clout. I hate this practice with a passion. If you're not using it, release it back.

An exchange I used to work for had (still has) a /16 that they were using internally.

Such a waste.
 
I wish the RIRs, or IANA for that matter had some clout. I hate this practice with a passion. If you're not using it, release it back.

An exchange I used to work for had (still has) a /16 that they were using internally.

Such a waste.
yup the university I went to had (and still has) a /16 when i went there, they gave printers real public IPs (they were firewalled, but still, printers...). So thats 64k public IPs. For what?
 
yup the university I went to had (and still has) a /16 when i went there, they gave printers real public IPs (they were firewalled, but still, printers...). So thats 64k public IPs. For what?
Some UK Universities have multiple /16s, usually because the computing department got their own allocation separate to the whole Uni, sometimes through mergers. Some UK Universities have also been selling some of their allocations. The hyperscalers usually buy any decent ranges that are available.
 
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