I would imagine that a block is much more valuable than the sum of its parts, so it's not quite right that a single IP is now worth $11.

Both for the ease of managing it (including setting up the routing) and because you realistically need at least 4 addresses for every subnet (/30 bitmask) -- two used up for broadcast and gateway address.

RFC 3021 eliminates the subnet and broadcast addresses so /31 is usable. That doubles your available space if you are primarily addressing links between routers.

Nortel is selling IPv4 addresses? It's bit difficult to sell something that is officially owned by the RIR (in this case: ARIN). Maybe Nortel (or the buyer) should review the current policy of allocation and assignment from ARIN : https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html

It says in the article that their IP space is from a legacy block, which means it's has never been given by IANA to any RIR, so ARIN can't make a claim on it. Not sure how they'd get 666k addresses out of legacy space though :).

I'm not sure that legacy blocks can be really transferable with an exchange of money.

http://www.merit.edu/events/mmc/pdf/2008_Stovall_ARIN.pdf

It seems as long as right holder is changed in the whoisdb... it seems fine.

They specifically allow it now, and I don't think this article has to do with 47/8. They probably cannot transfer 47/8. There are other, smaller allocations in ARIN WHOIS; my officemate rattled them off out loud but I couldn't add in my head fast enough. Dig through WHOIS, it probably adds up to 666k.

The situation has changed since 2008; maybe look at more recent ARIN policy.

I wonder what Microsoft is going to do with the block. If you have a valid use for addresses, you can still get them pretty much for free right now, though that'll change in a few months.

Perhaps they're just hoarding them for the future already?

Microsoft got too many services to be sure about that, but Azure by itself probably has a high demand of adresses.

Buy Windows 8 Professional, get one IP free? ;-)

Interesting that the sale was on 666 thousand addresses, while Nortel has afaik a whole /8, 16.7M addresses. Where's the rest of them?

Since that's legacy from IANA, maybe they can't transfer it? My officemate found a significant number of smaller allocations belonging to them.

Different parts are sold to different parties, but I would bet on Ericcson.

They bought major assets of Nortel legacy.

Is this really the case the IP blocks can be sold onwards?

I always thought that IP address allocations were assigned by IANA (through the local regional registries like ARIN and RIPE), and as such were not any property of the assignee to be sold. If an address range was not needed anymore and the assignee surrendered control of them, they would return to the free IP address pool at the regional registry.

You can now perform a "specified transfer" to another entity, and if some money flows in the reverse direction, ARIN says they don't care. There's even "Craigslist for IP addresses": https://www.arin.net/resources/request/stls.html

Well, now we see why IPv6 is so slow to be implemented ... After food, oil, here comes the ip speculation. Not viable in the long term but meanwhile some will do a few bucks.

Actually, speculation should drive up prices, which will encourage people to move to v6 faster...

What will be a shame is when your ISP decides your routable address is worth $11 to them and they sell it out from under you, leaving you behind an ISP-level NAT.