He’s sitting on a stack of sweet, sweet IPv4 addresses … and needs some advice

“ISP wants a /24 back, what’s it worth?” The question comes from a user of the Reddit section devoted to networking … and I’m afraid the answer eventually boils down to “it depends.”

First of all, a /24 refers to a block of 256 contiguous IPv4 addresses, which as everyone knows have become a scarce commodity. The Reddit user explains:

“I work for a school district that is also involved with community Internet service. Because of this, we have had 3 separate public /24 IPv4 address blocks since about 1995.

“Every time we contact our ISP for something, they ask for a /24 back. We could probably do this if we took some time to restructure everything and moved all our services to the other two /24s. I know we should be good “internet citizens” and just give the address space back … but if we give these addresses up our chances of ever getting another contiguous block on our budget is 0. They want the space back because the addresses are now valuable.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here