Microsoft has offered to pay $7.5m for the block of 666,624 IP version 4 (IPv4) addresses from US-based network hardware vendor Nortel Networks.
The old Net addresses are running out of stock and the few remaining IPv4 addresses are commanding a premium. Microsoft has offered to buy a block of IP addresses at a cost of $11.25 each which is higher than the price of an average .com domain name.
The IPv4 net addresses were put up for auction as part of the sell-off of the bankrupt Nortel’s assets.
IPv4 allows for a maximum of approximately 4.3 billion devices. But the addresses have been rapidly running out. The last big blocks of IPv4 addresses were handed out in February and the entire stock of IPv4 addresses is likely to be exhausted by September 2011.
A "/8" is the biggest block of net addresses (comprising 16 million addresses) that the central repository the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority hands out.
