Organisations hoping to buy a little more time to implement IPv6 can now acquire IPv4 addresses from the United States, thanks to a new IP address transfer policy recently implemented by the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).
According to ARIN, IPv4 addresses may be transferred to organisations in another region if they demonstrate their needs to their Regional Internet Registry (RIR), which allocates and manages IP addresses for a particular region.
“Inter-regional transfers may take place only via RIRs who agree to the transfer and share compatible, needs-based policies. Such resources must be transferred in blocks of /24 or larger and will become part of the resource holdings of the recipient RIR,” ARIN noted in its policy statement.
Last April, Asia-Pacific became the first region in the world to run out of IPv4 addresses. Europe will deplete its allocation of IPv4 addresses later this year, followed by the U.S. next year. The solution is to move to IPv6, which supports over 340 undecillion IP addresses compared to 4.3 billion addresses for IPv4.
With ARIN’s implementation of the transfer policy, IPv4 address brokers such as IPv4 Market Group have started introducing IPv4 transfer services.
IPv4 Market Group’s transfer service, for example, requires the receiving entity in the Asia Pacific region to request approval for the transfer from APNIC, the RIR for the Asia-Pacific region. The transaction will then be negotiated with an appropriate seller, and orchestrated using IPv4 Market Group’s legal transfer paperwork, escrow services, and assistance through the RIRs.
Sandra Brown, president of IPv4 Market Group, said in a statement: “We believe a strong relationship with the global RIRs is key to effect the necessary change in the IPv4 marketplace to bring about open IPv4 trading.”
“Now that APNIC has virtually no IPv4 addresses left to distribute, and RIPE [Europe’s RIR] will soon be in a similar position, and perhaps within two years ARIN, it makes sense to allow the entities in these locations to trade openly in an unfettered IPv4 secondary market.”
if only local ISPs started doing something about IPv6
The local ISPs do have IPv6 services for business customers, though the option for consumers is limited to SuperInternet’s IPv6 addresses that you can subscribe on top of their fibre broadband service.