Only half-kidding, I recently told a capitalist in Canada how IPv4 addresses will be a good investment in the next year. Maybe Canada's Bill St. Arnaud was listening in on that conversation at a coffee shop in Toronto. He now says that IPv4 addresses could soon be valued at $200 each. That isn't unrealistic. Some cable companies already charge $25 a month for a static IP, meaning the "asset" is already worth more than $200 in some "remote" markets.

With IPv4 address exhaustion, it is natural for a market to develop to facilitate an efficient exchange of the commodity as the value goes up in the next year or two. However, the one thing St. Arnaud doesn't mention is that the wholesale market prices will fluctuate with supply and demand as various floods of recycled IP addresses enter the market and are bought up. Most importantly, over the long term, the price of an IPv4 address will drop to zero because it will become obsolete as everyone abandons the address space in their move to IPv6, so the hot-potato aspect of holding IPv4 addresses will serve as a deterrent to any speculators driving up the price.

If you are managing an enterprise, it is quite possible that the scarcity of IPv4 addresses could affect a planned project, whether it manifests itself as an additional delay or additional cost. There are key steps to take to plan your transition to IPv6, which includes a thorough inventory of all devices in your infrastructure that take an IP address. Today, that can include machines and equipment you might not think use IP at a first glance. Most importantly, involve your user base. Even those rogue servers that are against IT policy but still have some legitimate purpose need to be tracked down. In fact, that may be one good way to make sure everyone identifies all the devices, machines, and equipment that aren't on your IT equipment inventory.