From Bruce Perens K6BP:
Dear Fellow Amateurs,
You may have seen the news that Interop has returned its IP address
block to ARIN. See
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/10/embargoed-interop-gives-back-a-months-worth-of-ipv4-addresses.arsThis was done as a means of prompting other organizations that hold
large, mostly-unused blocks – that means us – to return them now that we
are approaching the exhaustion of available IPV4 addresses.Amateur Radio holds a block of 16 million IP addresses that are mostly a
relic of past operation. When TCP/IP over 1200 baud packet was
interesting, the IP address pool was far from exhaustion and holding
that block had no cost to the general public. Now, Amateur Radio is a
very significant contributor to the problem of global IPV4 address
exhaustion.Obviously it is true that everybody must convert to IPV6. As Amateurs,
technically competent and in complete control of our own networking
infrastructure, this is an easy place for us to lead. It isn’t so for
the global internet. Commercial internet providers must struggle with a
tremendous technically-naive user pool who must be guided through
conversion or provided with address translation kludges that will cause
service problems, routing hardware that can’t be converted to IPV6, and
a tremendous expense of converting all of this infrastructure and
training users and their own staff that has come at a really bad time
economically.Thus, I suggest that Amateurs would be fulfilling their social duty to
the public by returning an address pool that they no longer need as soon
as possible, and leading in conversion of their remaining and future
TCP/IP operations to IPV6.This isn’t like giving up a frequency band that will never be returned -
equivalent IPV6 address blocks are available to us, and the IPV6 address
space is astronomical in size compared to IPV4.Many Thanks
Bruce Perens K6BP
2 Comments
Tried routing to a 44/8 address recently?
Significant portions of the 44 address space are in use by organisations such as NASDAQ and NYSE. The stock exchange business has been using the 44.x.x.x address space for at least 10 years with the full knowledge of InterNIC and other outfits whom are responsible for the allocation of numbers.
Amateur radio is still the notional owner of 44.x.x.x but is not by any means its exclusive user.
IPV6 is not yet possible with the current set of amateur radio software. *NOS (JNOS/UKNOS/BNOS/etc) have no IPV6 abilities available to them.
As for 1200bd, when was the last time you saw that on the air? Most systems are now upgraded to at least 9600 (those that are left that is) and new networks are popping up all over the place thanks to renewed interest by OEM groups and D-STAR messaging interoperability.
Interesting, I just read about this address block. I agree, IPv6 is a sure fire alternative for our group and as Mark pointed out, our reservation isn’t stopping them from being handed out. I wouldn’t even know who to ask for an allocation anyway. I’m one of the few Hams that is interested in high speed microwave amateur radio operations, no others around here are so i can see IPv6 being in place before any kind of HSMM network is functional.
- “As for 1200bd, when was the last time you saw that on the air?” Every heard of APRS? 1200 baud is still got its foot stuck in the door with it, 9600 baud is the oddball. Other than the Kantronics TNC, there are few true hardware modems for 9600bd which disappoints me. SDR is NOT a viable option for battery powered systems. And I don’t care for proprietary corporate manufactured radios with digital functions unless the radio is *completely* open source. There is no point in setting up an infrastructure only to find out the equipment manufacture just discontinued that product/system and the replacement is not compatible nor will they release firmware source, etc.