Coronavirus Impact on IPv4 Address Market

As more businesses, schools, and government institutions instruct millions of employees to work from home, concerns about the strength of the internet’s IPV4 backbone infrastructure arise. More people video conferencing and kids no longer in school, but rather playing video games and streaming movies, will mean more connections, more bandwidth usage and ultimately more IPv4.

The large teclo’s such as AT&T and Verizon have backed this claim by saying the volume of traffic is and will continue to change in usage patterns – mainly more use of home networks versus business networks.

Therefore, the need for IPv4 addresses will continue to increase because there will be a need for more devices connecting to VPN’s, smaller networks, video streaming and websites around the world.

In short, the diagnosis is that if your organization relies on offshore manufacturing, it has been affected by current market conditions. Most of the market is seeing over 15% loss in the last month, which has started a massive selling frenzy . What can your company do while profits are decreasing for an unknown period of time?

If you have extra unused IPv4 address space, this can be an opportunity to sell IPv4 addresses and generate additional revenue  to offset losses. The added profits can help potentially prevent employee layoffs during what can become a world epidemic.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, If your organization will experience an influx of users accessing your services due to increased internet usage, you will probably need to Buy IPv4 to support the masse that will be working remote and staying in. As an example, Zoom Videos stock has increased 20% over the last month, even while most companies have seen a significant losses.

Making sense of information, real or manufactured is a choice we all have to make. Either take action now and mitigate perceived future risk or hold steady and weather the storm.

In any case, we hope everyone stays safe during this difficult.  While it looks like there is no end in sight, we always figure out a way to get through the worst of times.