IPv4 was not supposed to sustain
today’s demand for the capability of being connected to the internet. For that
reason, IPv6 emerged, and it will continue to be important to the development
of the IoT. Anyhow, this is not to say that IPv4 addresses will be phased out;
instead, the internet market will switch to IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking
solutions, aiming to confirm seamless interoperability among the two protocol
versions. Therefore, companies will have to get enough IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
The former has been exhausted, so the role of leasing IP addresses being the connecting
component will become stronger.
IP
Leasing: A Recap
Every
RIR has exhausted its IPv4 address pool, but the requirement for these
addresses has not come down. There is an ever-increasing number of connections,
so the requirement is unparalleled. IPv6 may be the next phase of the internet’s
further development, but it will take much more time for its use to be
widespread. The factors that will contribute to the delay include the issues
regarding IT infrastructural adaptability, plus implementation costs. This is
where the option to lease
IP addresses comes in.
There
is generally a big number of IP addresses available to bigger businesses, but
they hesitate to sell these because the small supply of the addresses causes these
to be regarded as valuable strategic assets. With leasing, the businesses can
free up their unutilized IPv4 addresses through a marketplace specialized for
it, while retaining their ownership.
Leasing
the addresses to third-parties in need of these has three-fold advantages. For
one, it results in the unutilized resources being monetized, which then enables
getting more revenue streams. Meanwhile, small and mid-sized enterprises can
use the chance to get the addresses they require.
Leasing
is much more cost-effective for a small-scale vendor, so if the IPv4 lease option
is not there, several entities could not get the resources. If your enterprise fails
to get these, it would hinder its capability to scale or change its size. Finally,
allowing the previously-unutilized addresses to enter the market again, will
reduce the pressure on your network because of the IPv4 shortage. This allowance
will contribute to internet governance that can be sustained more than before.
The
IPv4-IPv6 Transition-Related Challenges
This transition
may have started some decades before, but it is not progressing at a quick rate.
It takes a huge investment, bare-metal server upgrades, as well as legacy
software and other resource upgrades to make the infrastructure better so that
the protocols can be supported. All of the above make the transition lengthy
and costly, making it a process that not every market player can pursue.
Even
so, the ones having the right number of IP resources have started to migrate to
IPv6 gradually. Almost every device is IPv4-compatible, so implementing the
dual-stack configurations is the lone way to facilitate further development.