UK government is squatting on 1.67 million unused IPv4 addresses

Cory Doctorow 9:38 am Tue Sep 18, 2012

The UK's Department for Work and Pensions is squatting on an unused block of super-scarce IPv4 addresses. Specifically, they're sitting on a /8 network with 1.67 million spare addresses. A petition asks the government to sell these off.

It has recently come to light that the Department for Work and Pensions has its own allocated block of 16,777,216 addresses (commonly referred to as a /8), covering 51.0.0.0 to 51.255.255.255. The estimated market value of this block of addresses is between $0.5 and $1.5 billion.

Analysis shows that the DWP is not using any of these addresses in public. If they are being used for internal, private networks then this is a phenomenal waste of public funds – the block 10.0.0.0/8 is specifically earmarked for use on internal private networks, and using the globally routed 51.0.0.0/8 internally is madness.

£1 billion of low-effort extra cash would be a very nice thing to throw at our deficit.

The DWP should sell its block of 16777216 IP addresses

(via /.0

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