I followed this topic with interest, but I see it in a different perspective.
It seems that many of the people involved in this topic see the picture from a glass tower. Cisco and Juniper may be widespread at infrastructure/provider level, but we should also take in account the fact that not all the ampr routing will be implementable at provider level.
For example in Romania we have 3 major providers, covering more than 95% of the end user market. This competition resulted in extreme low prices for high speed internet access (about 10 EUR/month for a 50Mbps fiber optics acces or a 20Mbps ADSL link) but at home user level, some together with free mobile networking and free nation wide hotspot access. On the other hand more advanced features seen as "commercial" and "corporate" features come at extremly high prices. Just a fixed IP will pull another 2-3 EUR from ones pocket (if even available to home users for a specific ISP), not speaking of BGP, which jumps up at the levels of hundreds EUR/month. Also, the ISPs totally reluctant in implementing features for our "obscure" hobbies lke amateur radio which doesn't bring them major profits or a large number of new customers.
In this light, is not necessary a matter of equipment, which is a one time investment, but an issue of service availability. Any protocol for interlinking ampr islands would need to be encapsulated, routable and able to run over tunnels, otherwise the only option for us (I speak for YO) will be to remain stucked with the IPIP tunnels forever. On the other hand, universities, which usually are the front runners in such endeavors efectly lost their interest for ham radio so advanced endpoints of access which would be possible here are actually not available.. So today we are in a sad situation. Ampr net in YO is dying: 3 gateways oficially left, with one of them hanging on a dynamic IP with no actual services, one without a working gateway, and only my home system having a working GW, with virtual no users.
Packet radio found APRS and survives, but unless we find a clear advantage over existing internet services, the 44 network will disappear.
Marius, YO2LOJ