Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators Early in the history of the internet, the powers that be granted amateur radio operators over 16 million IPv4 addresses. Now a proposal has emerged suggesting the same community be granted a substantial chunk of the IPv6 numberspace. The proposal to give amateur radio operators some IPv6 addresses emerged in an IETF draft that …
As they already once has used that kind of gift as a commodity, it should be stipulated _very_ clearly in any documents, that any attempt of selling addresses would revert the ownership.
... Yeah. I know that it is highly unlikely ever to become an issue. But so was 2^32 addresses once, yet here we are.
Yes, it's worth considering that the existing 44/8 block was divided geographically as follows:
United States: half of it
Amazon: a quarter of it
33 countries: Most of the rest of it
Not allocated: all of the rest of it
159 countries, including all of Africa and most of Asia and South America: nothing
To use another method, all the countries that have even one block within this are also the countries that have the most IPV4 addresses anyway.
If you're unhappy with how the AMPR people distributed 44/8, take it up with them. Or contact the Internet Address Police at 127.0.0.1.
There's no concept of geography here anyway. Just because 44.155.0.0/16 got assigned to Ireland doesn't mean the IP addresses in that /16 are only used in Ireland or were issued exclusively to Irish entities - or are held by Irish radio hams today.
Oh, and there's plenty of address space in that link you posted which isn't allocated to anyone. I'm reasonably sure all of Africa and most of Asia and South America could get some of that space if they could be bothered to ask for it. Maybe they have better things to do with their time. Or maybe it's too hard to get a radio licence in (say) Zimbabwe => no callsign => no entitlement to an address in 44/8.
Given that the AMPR people have no reason to care what I or anyone else thinks, that seems like a waste of time. Of course, neither does IANA. However, it might be relevant to people deciding whether AMPR is a wise user or a fitting recipient of what they were given.
Your idea of "no concept of geography" is probably different from mine. When the organization allocates blocks by country and, in two cases (the US and Germany) to states within that country, that looks rather geographic to me. When all of the ten sub-users of the Ireland zone are marked with either Irish geographic names or Irish call signs, it's not making a very good case for "doesn't mean the IP addresses in that /16 are only used in Ireland or were issued exclusively to Irish entities". But I'm sure you have an explanation for why an intentionally geographic distribution system isn't geographic after all. A pity you couldn't include that in your post claiming so, but if we ever discover the secret, it will provide much context.
"As they already once has used that kind of gift as a commodity....."
Worth noting here that the 'they' in question are a small group of people in the position to benefit, and not radio hams in general ;) The $100million will have no doubt ended up mainly going into a very small number of trouser pockets.
The $100M endowed Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC, https://www.ardc.net ), a foundation that operates very transparently. "Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) is a private foundation that exists to support amateur radio and digital communication science and technology. We do this through making grants (including support for scholarship programs and research & development projects) and managing 44Net." They give out project grants and scholarships. Grantees are expected to follow open source guidelines for any code they produce. A lot of the individuals involved, on committees or management, are folks who were doing amateur packet radio back in the 1980s.
If that is how it works, then that is all good, and much better than I had assumed. I will stand (at least partially) corrected :)
The trouble nowadays is that as soon as we hear of a trough full of money changing hands, we tend to assume there are one or more snouts being pushed eagerly into it (an assumption made because it often turns out that there are!).
AFAIK even companies like Apple Computer got a /8. IP-Addresses used to be like phone numbers, they don't actually cost anything. (apart from, perhaps, some management fee to cover the work the IANA puts in)
I mean now with IPv6 we are _actually_ at a point where we have enough addresses, so addresses can be free again.
Over the years the amateur community led the way in many fields. We had microwaves to play with and proved they could work over distance!
Radar can be traced back to us as well. Since then all sorts of pressure is alls part of the commercial spectrum for us to loose the very things we use.
It is a large body of qualified engineers that have the time and no commercial pressure too experiment and prove ideas.
Here in GB, the Amateur Radio licence was (is?) granted for the purpose of 'self-training in wireless telegraphy'. Us engineering bods had much fun making antennas, receivers and transmitters and test equipment. So much more fun than buying commercial gear. I was into packet radio, and spent my time converting commercial radios for use at VHF/UHF nodes, and building TNCs for myself and others. Great bunch of people, all sorts of trades, ages and attitudes.
Things have got simpler now. Decent, simple hand-held transceivers can be bought for peanuts, with and without the 'digital' stuff. You can also buy all singing, all dancing HF multimode radios for big money if you want (I know one guy with a radio costing in excess of GBP10k!). Most stuff these days is computer controllable, with some of the serious 'contest' stations relying heavily on automation.
Fascinating hobby, bloody good training in a range of disciplines, plus great people, usually..
I am a G7, and the only spectrum I am on is 2M and above:-) You can keep the HF 'DC' stuff and the associated humongous antennas!
> You can keep the HF 'DC' stuff and the associated humongous antennas!
You don't need a humongous antenna to use H/F. I live on the west coast (K6) and have no problem crossing the Pacific on a bit of wire and 20 watts ("when conditions are decent", of course). The low power end of the game is where the challenge is -- there's something about using 2 or 5 watts on WSPR and getting a ping from thousands of miles away. Its like waving a flashlight on your patio and getting a corresponding wave from someone in Japan.
For VHF I think the most fun I've had is with LoRa modulation on the unlicensed part of the 900MHz spectrum. (e.g. Meshtastic). That stuff seems to have virtually unlimited range using just a few tens of milliwatts. (Daughter & SiL were recently flying a plane at 10,000 feet over the Mojave with a Meshtastic node, got pings from Las Vegas to the LA Basin.)
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I fully support the idea of giving a bunch of technical experimenters the resources to experiment with, but the scale seems wildly excessive. Are they wanting to assign an IP address to every Hz in the spectrum?
The whole "IPv6 has 340 undecillion addresses" argument is moot if you're dishing them out in blocks of 5 nonillion - we'll run out eventually, and a lot sooner than people think.
Quick! Let's get started now on IPv7 before we run out!
There are a million nonillions in an undecillion. If we gave away a block of 5 nonillion every day, it would take ~200,000 years to exhaust the IPv6 address space. I doubt any of us will live to see that day.
FWIW only a handful of IPv6 blocks have been allocated outside the RIR system since IPv6 was invented, roughly one every 5 years or so. See https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-address-space.xhtml. If that rate continues, IPv6 space will last for something like 400 million years. And if/when we get close to that crunch point, it's likely steps will be taken to make more efficient use of the allocated address space, just like we're doing for IPv4 today.
A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far away: The Empire is about to run out of internet addresses. This is disrupting plans for the building of the 3,023rd Death Star. Grand Emperor Palpatine has somehow returned. In order to cut through the bureaucratic arguments he has decided to chair the 27,156,458th meeting of the Intergalactic Committee on Net Protocols to finally either totally migrate from IPv4 to IPv6 or to create IPvX and have done with both of them.
After 4 hours of painfully written dialogue the Emperor draws his lightsaber and kills everyone in the room. [Audience cheers.] Darth Jar Jar is put in charge of IPvX.
THE END
Episode MXIV: In the meantime, a small group of rebels oppose the Emperor and want communications to remain compatible with the force. The rebels have already acquired the plans for IPvX. They are actively opposing the all seeing destructive consequences of IPvX and want to blow it up before it can be activated. A young unwilling farmer, Luke Novell, bought the crashed humadroids unknowingly carrying the plans of IPvX' destruction to be presented to Router Kenobi. ...
Expect a cease and desist from the Lucas estate forthwith.
I'm safe! I'm safe! Lucas can't get me. He sold everything Star Wars to Disney. So they could squat in its decaying husk and endlessly violate its memory for smaller and smaller profits, until it was all destroyed.
Disney are that nice corporation. All about making the little 'uns happy. Nice cartoons and fairy tales. Mickey Mouse...
Uh oh! Mickey Mouse? Infinite lawsuits ahoy! We're doomed! Doomed!
Or, as an alternative, we give them a /32 and in the extremely unusual case that they manage to use even a tiny slice of that, not crazy when you consider that quite a lot of their IPV4 block is unused even when they have software that uses a /24 all on its own, we do something about it then.
Then perhaps we should consider what the point of having a separate block is at all. At the moment, the IPV4 allocation may be quite generous to a rather small pool of users, but at least those users have something they otherwise would not; if they've got the amateur radio license, they can have addresses which are difficult for others to get without payment. In IPV6, that's no longer the case. Any experimentation they want to do can be run on easily obtained RIR-issued blocks. Any organization deeming it useful to have a single block from which smaller ones can be cut can get these easily from RIRs.
"Well I for one would urge someone to give Poettering a ginormous IPv6 allocation in the hope we never hear from him or systemd ever again."
Or....systemd is able to allocate a truly unique loopback to every local application to avoid the dreaded "address already in use"error without having to worry about exhausting 127/8
640Kb ought to be enough for anybody*. Another 6400Kb on request.
With regards to the comment about high latency connections near the end of the article.
We already have a working protocol that has an incredibly high latency and has been tested, which proved viable:
IPoAC
The high-latency packets could follow a similar principal, with larger amounts of data being transmitted less frequently with a long lead time.
Who'd have thought an Internet protocol submitted for April fools would be practical? (Note: a lot of them have ended up having practical uses or lead to research which helped other ideas along)
IPoAC has been successfully implemented, but for only nine packets of data, with a packet loss ratio of 55% (due to operator error), and a response time ranging from 3,000 seconds (50 min) to over 6,000 seconds (100 min). Thus, this technology suffers from extremely high latency.
The number of address is immaterial since the minimum useful network size is a /64 and the minimal routable tends to be a /56 and for this use a common allocation will be a /48. That means 2^40 networks so if a country code is added, that leaves about 2^24 networks per country. For the US, that means 16 million networks for about 700 thousand ham operators.
I would expect more objections from the NICs seeing that they can't collect money from this.
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