Somewhere in your network closet, you have an asset with a value you'd be surprised about. Not a server, not a piece of software, just a number, an IP address. And today, businesses are buying, selling and leasing them around the world.
Here's the twist: the world already ran out.
How We Got Here
IPv4 was initially designed to address the vast need of 4.3 billion addresses. Its significance and demand seemed to be limitless before smartphones, cloud-based servers and other devices came to dominate the modern world. As of now, all regional registries that allocate IPv4 addresses have exhausted their resources. Consequently, no new addresses will be available for allocation in the future.
Scarcity Created a Market
That shortage didn't just create a problem, it created an economy:
• Rising prices: IPv4 blocks are rising in value and behaving more like appreciating assets
• Leasing prevalence: Companies are able to lease the address space they need, rather than making large capital expenditures
• Address hoarding unveiled: Many companies are sitting on address blocks that they have forgotten about
This begs the question, do you know how much IPv4 address space your company owns that it is not currently using?
Hidden Value, Hiding in Plain Sight
Unused blocks usually come from the same few places:
• Old infrastructure that nobody decommissioned correctly
• Subnets, which were sized for some growth plan that changed
• Leftover space from some merger/acquisition
If that's you, then in fact you're sitting on cash, not dead weight.
Two Sides of the Same Shortage
• Have an excess space? You can rent it out and benefit from the unused assets.
• Need a larger space? You can rent in without any capital investment and without a long wait period.
The shortage did not close the door. It opened the market and it has started to pick winners. The only risk is that you don't know which side you are on.
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