Key points:
- Universities could have an unexpected income stream right before their very eyes–their stores of IPv4 addresses
- Businesses have created ongoing demand for IPv4 addresses from their growing networks
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In recent years, universities have faced a perfect storm of factors that have contributed to an educational financial crisis. The cost of delivering high-quality higher education has skyrocketed, while public funding has declined. At the same time, the global pandemic, the rise of online learning, the cost of tuition, and declining enrollment have reduced other income streams. However, many universities are sitting on a hidden fortune–their valuable troves of IPv4 addresses–that could bring a much-needed boost to their coffers.
Why do many higher educational institutions have a surplus of IPv4 addresses?
In the early days of the internet, IP addresses were considered a research and educational tool. Consequently, universities and research institutions were allocated huge numbers of them, often as many as 16 million in each location. At the time, nobody anticipated the future insatiable need for IP addresses–driven by the exponential expansion of connected devices–so the original vast supply of 4.3 billion addresses was considered more than enough.
But those addresses have run out with ARIN, the North American registry responsible for their allocation, announcing their depletion as long ago as 2015. Of course, by that time, IPv6, a replacement standard, had been introduced. IPv6 offers an unthinkably large number of available addresses, but it is not backwards compatible with IPv4. Businesses with urgent internal priorities have largely ignored it, creating ongoing demand for IPv4 addresses from growing networks. Scarcity has driven current high demand for unused IPv4 addresses, and their limited availability means that their value continues to rise dramatically.
Three potential pathways to monetize these hidden assets
Even the largest universities are sometimes unable to fully utilize every IPv4 address in their stockpile. Those with a surplus can monetize these intangible assets to finance both immediate needs and long-term projects.
Lee Howard is a senior vice president at IPv4.Global. A thought leader in Internet Protocols, Lee Howard has 30 years of experience in networking. He has served on the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Board of Trustees of the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN), and as a working-group co-chair of IPv6 Renumbering and IPv6 Operations working groups at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
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