30 Jul
2021
30 Jul
'21
6:48 a.m.
Hello Matt, thanks a lot for the message!
On 30 Jul 2021, at 13:11, Matt Perkins via 44Net
<44net(a)mailman.ampr.org> wrote:
I assume there are fewer users in 44.128/10 then on hamnet and i assume that's the
reason why the 44.128/10 users are being asked to renumber. Where i think the elephant in
the room is that the hamnet users should not be using public routed capable address space
in the first place. There is no technical reason why they should use public addresses and
not RFC 6598 for example or RFC 1918. In this case RFC 6598 is more appropriate i think
as it is being natted in places onto the internet and provides a type of utility.
My day job is in carrier internet which i have been involved with since the early
90's. I have been evolved in everything from policy making to nuts and bolts core
network design I even have my name in some of the code that you likely use every day as
part of the internet backbone and if I told any of my peers a bunch of hobbits were using
millions of dollars of publicly addressable internet ranges for an intranet I would
struggle to convince them i was not jokeing.
The excuse "Because we can" to squander millions of dollars worth of resource
is very hard to justify.
Now dont get me wrong im very grateful to have the resource and I will renumber my BGP
advertised to the public internet direct 44.128/10 range if that's the consensus. But
I think its very hard to justify using any space at all for an intranet in 2021. Carriers
and ISP's and enterprises have spent that last 10 years and millions of dollars
solving that exact problem and the answer is IPv6 and RFC6598
Unfortunately, as I said in previous e-mails, we cannot use a space such as RFC1918 or
Carrier Grade NAT because it is not globally unique. There are ISPs that use 10/8
addresses that are assigned to end users in their WAN, and there are ISPs that use RFC6598
for their customers’ WAN connections too. So there will be overlaps, conflicts, and
problems. We absolutely have to ensure global uniqueness and guarantee non-overlap for
this to work at a large scale. And the only way we know how to do this is with space from
44/8.
Again, going back to the similar analogy of RF spectrum: Why should we give these “radio
amateurs” so much and so valuable spectrum? Why waste literal billions worth of it
globally? If they want to communicate, they should use the phone system or the Internet
like everything else. I don’t see a reason for them to get this tremendously expensive
resource “because they can” or “because they want to”.
Last December, Greece, a tiny country with only 10M people proceeded to rent spectrum for
5G. They rented this spectrum for 15 years (not forever) and only in a few bands (not
across the entire thing). Just for one tiny country, just for 15 years, just for one
technology (5G) the government made 372M EUR or close to $450M. This is more money than
the entire 44/8. If we add up the cost of the entire 5G spectrum around the world, we are
clearly in the billions of dollars.
They gave a 15-year license for parts of: 3400-3800 MHz, 700 MHz, 2 GHz, and 26 GHz.
Today radio amateurs have “for free” so many more bands, so many more allocations, so much
more spectrum and bandwidth. And why? One could argue that 5G will serve much more people
and much more important use cases than ham radio spectrum. One could also argue that a /24
on 44 net provides less to the society as a whole than a /24 in AWS or anyone else.
Should we return all our spectrum back because we “waste millions of dollars worth of
resource”? I think we’re “wasting” not just millions with spectrum but probably tens of
billions.
Would we be happy if the FCC told our US friends that they’re taking back all spectrum
allocated to amateur radio and they can now use the frequencies of WiFi or FM (Music)
Radio if they want, as secondary users, and never cause any interference or problems to
primary users (stations or WiFi or BT devices or microwave ovens)? Technically if they do
this, they don’t “waste” billions of dollars of space, and they can push these “intranet”
people to a shared medium. Let them then figure out an ISM band where they don’t overlap
with any other use case in this local area. Take back the dedicated resources.
—
As you can tell, there is a large argument to be made for using 44.128/10 for the
ham-to-ham communication. The reason we want radio amateurs to use this space is because
it’s theirs, and they can do whatever they want with it. They got it allocated, so they
can use it. Hopefully, unlike the real RF spectrum, it won’t be taken back from them if
they don’t…
Antonis