IT experts warn that the pool of IPv4 addresses left unused is rapidly running dry for America. Sandra Brown, president of IPv4 Market Group, says the prices for IPv4 addresses are going to soar.

IPv4 stands for Internet Protocol version 4. The standard dates from the late ’80s when it was naively assigned only a few billion addresses as 32-bit integers. Now that they’re running out, Internet-reliant businesses are being forced to make the leap to IPv6, a new version of the Internet Protocol which goes the extra mile and uses a 128-bit address. This allows for infinitely more addresses than IPv4. Enough probably to supply every planet in our galaxy that has Internet.

The jump to IPv6 is a scary prospect for some

The news may sound good at first, but it’s actually very bad. The leap to IPv6 is costly because it requires new hardware. For a cloud company, the costs for such an undertaking are huge.

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America has about 1.3 billion IPv4 addresses assigned to it. Of these, only a few million remain up for grabs. The price of a single address, as relayed by IPv4 Market Group, is just north of 11 dollars. According to the group’s president, Sandra Brown, those prices are on the rise as the pool of available addresses is rapidly being depleted. Brown, who was cited by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, even has a rough estimate for when IPv4 will eventually give its last breath in America: this summer.

Internet giants who are seeing their arm twisted have every reason to put off the leap, experts say, because the costs to hop aboard the IPv6 bandwagon will eventually drop. Until then, however, companies with leftover piles of IPv4 addresses stand to make a handsome profit by selling them for recycling.