If your company owns a block of IPv4 addresses and is interested in selling it, or if your company wants to purchase additional addresses, now may be the best time to do so. For sellers, a good reason to sell address blocks is to make money and get some use out of an old corporate asset. If your company has acquired other businesses, particularly ones that have assets from the early Internet pioneers, chances are you might already have at least one range that is gathering dust, or is underused.

So began an interesting journey for me and my range of class C addresses. It took months to figure out the right broker to list my block and to work through the many issues to prove that I actually was assigned it back in the mid 1990s. Thus began my own journey to correct this information and get it ready for resale. The process involved spending a lot of time studying the various transfer webpages at ARIN, calling their transfer hotline several times for clarifications on their process, and paying a $300 transfer fee to start things off. ARIN staff promises a 48-hour turnaround to answer e-mails, and that can stretch out the time to prepare your block if you have a lot of back-and-forth interactions, as I did.

You can read my report in the current issue of the Internet Protocol Journal here. I review some of the historical context about IPv4 address depletion, the evolution of the used address marketplace, the role of the block brokers and the steps that I took to transfer and sell my block.