As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, Nortel Networks has sold more than half a million IPv4 addresses to Microsoft for $7.5 million.
The sale includes 666,624 IPv4 addresses that Nortel obtained in the 1990s. Of that, 470,016 addresses are available for immediate use, while 196,608 will be ready by year's end.
Nortel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2009, and started exploring the sale of its businesses and assets in June 2009. Realizing that IPv4 addresses might be an attractive prospect to some companies, Nortel retained an advisor, Addrex, which reached out to 80 potential buyers in December 2010.
As Nortel pointed out in its filing, "IPv4 addresses will eventually be supplanted by IPv6 addresses, of which there is a virtually unlimited supply, but this is expected to take several years. Because of the limited supply of IPv4 addresses, there is currently an opportunity to realize value from marketing the Internet Numbers, which opportunity will diminish over time as IPv6 addresses are more widely adopted."
In February, the Number Resource Organization (NRO), an industry group made up of five regional Internet provider registries, said it had handed out the last of the 4.3 billion available addresses on the IPv4 system.
Of the 80 parties contacted by Addrex and Nortel, 14 signed non-disclosure agreements to examine more in-depth information about the IPv4 addresses. By January 2011, Nortel received four bids to acquire all the available addresses and three bids for a partial sale. Microsoft was the winner with a $7.5 million bid.