Hello Everyone,
To get an ASN we will need to negotiate with ARIN regarding their standard AS contract; it appears to require those applying for an ASN to relinquish a significant amount of autonomy, an amount that I believe is incompatable with the way we wish to continue to operate network 44.
I was curious if you could elaborate on this point. I've gone through the ASN process twice in the pastand beyond proving that I had two or more functioning BGP speaking Internet connections, I don't remember any language that required my companies to do anything unnatural in the way they conducted business.
Note also that an ASN costs $500 plus an annual maintenance fee. The nonprofit is already about $1k in the hole, financed entirely by me. We have no source of funds; everything is being done by volunteers including a significant amount of pro-bono work by a networking-policy-savvy attorney who has kindly volunteered her time even though she is not a ham radio licensee (yet).
Using $1500+Maintenance fees as a budgetary conversation starter, maybe we could setup a Paypal (whatever) donation system to recover these costs? I think it's more than fair that when new HAMs get an AMPR IP allocation or gets listed into the encaps file, asking for say a one time $10 US donation fee seems very reasonable. I want to say I saw someone mention that we have 2000 active AMPR tunnels at the moment. Assuming not everyone can or will want to donate money, a 150 donations will kickstart this effort effort which would recover your sunk costs (thank you so much for absorbing this already), get the group a ASN, and cover future costs, etc.
73s, --David KI6ZHD