The financial leadership of big organizations has long been purchasing and selling Internet Protocol addresses. Despite that, many of them do not know that it is a better option to lease IP addresses than to sell these.
The IP resources may be an element of the so-called internet backbone, but these are not visible to almost every user. Small businesses or customers that utilize the internet primarily to host or browse a simple site have their addresses assigned automatically to them via DHCP when setting up their routers.
However, for large internet capacity users, including companies, organizations known as regional internet registries allocate IP addresses in blocks. In the US, the RIR that does this for those users is ARIN. IPv4 addresses were assigned for free up until some years before, but these resources are virtually extinct. Being based on the 32-bit number system limits the potential address count to around 4.3 billion. The limit is what fuels the purchase and trade of the resources. When MIT made 50% of its IP addresses available for sale ten years ago, for instance, these became a trendy commodity among a big customer, Amazon, that required them in the maximum quantity.
New Version Of IP Addresses
The Internet Engineering Task Force deployed IPv6, the new version with the 128-bit system, to tackle the IPv4 shortage. IPv6 addresses may also be free, but just a fraction of big customers adopted IPv6 as their new standard. Almost all of those users are part of the world’s most sophisticated tech companies.
The rate of IPv6 adoption is quite slow due to the infrastructural changes that companies would need to deploy for accommodating the addresses. Therefore, tech giants such as Amazon and Google and big mobile operators like Verizon have led the adoption process. For almost every other company, it is more sensible to keep leveraging IPv4 until widespread adoption becomes more affordable through broader technological changes.
Demand For Leasing
Meanwhile, the market to sell or buy IPv4 assets keeps thriving, with the price per IPv4 address reaching an all-time high this May. This means an organization with numerous surplus IP addresses could create millions of US dollars as an infusion of cash if it offers the excess stock for sale.
Nevertheless, companies could earn more money with the IPv4 lease option. The key here is the relatively higher-than-usual yield gains that organizations could get through the global IPv4 market, which averages 25% now.
Leasing has played a role secondary to IP selling for a long time. Naysayers regard it as a cumbersome process, as it does not have the transparency of the IP sales process in some respects. However, IP broker professionals feel that the marketplace has matured much and that leasing is more proximate to the conventional sales process.