Re: [44net] I gave a talk tonight.

I presume you mean routing other subnets over amateur radio frequencies. We used to do that. But there are two main problems with it here in the US. 1) Encryption. More than half of websites are now encrypted and the percentage is growing every day. E-mail encryption is also on the rise. And encryption is not allowed over US amateur frequencies. So amateur frequencies are fast becoming impractical/irrelevant for real-world, mainstream network traffic. 2) 3rd party-initiated traffic. Routing inbound e-mail, even if unencrypted, over an amateur frequency is a violation of Part 97, according to the FCC enforcement bureau. At least it was when I asked them about this a few years ago. That's because anyone anywhere could initiate a transmission on an amateur frequency without a license simply by sending you an email. So we allowed only outbound email from hams to traverse the amateur frequencies. Inbound email stopped at the gateway. It wasn't very practical, but at least a message could go out. We later got internet connections at all of our hub sites. So we turned each of them into their own gateways. Users can access the site over amateur frequencies to download their mail since the ham initiates that connection. But we still have to filter out encrypted email. And we're using Part 15 frequencies between hub sites. I suppose we could still use 44.x addresses. But since a 44.x subnet can only exist behind one gateway in AMPRnet routing, we didn't see much point in that either. Not trying to be a bummer. But the FCC regulations really squash creativity and innovation. Michael N6MEF