The UK government has started selling off internet addresses that it no longer uses.
The first group of 150,000 addresses has been snapped up by a Norwegian firm called Altibox for about £600,000.
[...]The surplus addresses are part of a much bigger block of 16 million addresses given to the Department of Work and Pensions in 1993. Earlier this year, the DWP started a project to see how many of these IP addresses could be freed.
An official report produced before the DWP began its investigation suggested that 70% of the massive block was used for the UK government's internal network, leaving about five million free for disposal.
What are the chances the government will end up leasing some back from the companies they are selling them to?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday May 24 2015, @12:52PM
I understand that it was normal in the early days to assign "external" IP addresses even to internal printers. This is not just a government thing; companies that were early in the IT business, like IBM, Microsoft and Novell, got huge allocations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @04:25PM
block of 16 million addresses ... leaving about five million free for disposal.
So they're using 11 million IPv4 addresses? Is that like 1 (or more) per employee?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @01:48AM
I found figures from March 2014 where they have 101,205 employees, so that is approximately 108 per employee. I can't imagine they are using anywhere near that many, but they probably decided it was too much trouble to reconfigure the network to free up addresses in blocks large enough to be worth selling.