| NJ5 said: There are companies and other institutions out there which own more than 16 million IP addresses (i.e. a range of X.0.0.0 to X.255.255.255): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IP_address_blocks I'm sure they'll be happy to sell parts of their ranges if IP addresses become expensive enough... |
But the routing tables would have to be updated, and for reasons of software complexity and compatibility it's not a good idea to split sold /8 blocks up like that anyway. It could be done, but the investment needed versus number of addresses recovered would only work for large organisations with lots of cash. Not for signing up new home users. Same goes for the currently 'unusable' blocks.
The problem is that, even if IPv6 was widely adopted tomorrow, you still need an IPv4 address to communicate with IPv4-only servers. So there will be a point where even new IPv6-using customers will need IPv4 addresses and there won't be any.
This close to the year 2000 (as we are to the last /8 block being sold), most companies had already prepared for Y2K. IPv6 adoption at this point is in the 1-2% range of servers and a negligible amount of actual internet traffic is IPv6 due to the requirement that both ends need to support IPv6 to do so.
