Re: [44net] 44net is not just for tunneling

I have been watching these discussions with interest, from my perspective here in the UK, I have the following comments: There have been several, what I would consider, US-Centric views discussed and I think everyone needs to appreciate that this is World wide, what is being done in the US (or any other specific country for that matter) may be (and usually is) very different to other countries. Not only that, we have a lot of widely varying projects on the go, with sometimes conflicting interests, not everyone uses the same software/hardware/protocols and we need to bear all this in mind when moving forward with whatever plan is decided upon. Whether we individually, or as a group, agree with how the rest of the Internet is cobbled together, we are not going to change it, so we should simply embrace it and integrate our 44/8 in the accepted manner. By this I mean, we should obtain an AS number as a matter of priority, then introduce additional border routers to announce the 44/8 in other countries. IMHO there should be a minimum of two border routers announcing the entire 44/8 that have (tunnelled?) backhaul between them. If individual countries then wish to setup border routers to announce more specific prefixes for their country (generally /16's) then I don't see a problem with that either, the more diverse our setup, the more resilient it becomes, no more single point of failure for connectivity with the rest of the internet at large. Of course, what we then do "internally" is up to us to decide, but as a baseline we should be "hooking up" to the Internet in the currently accepted manner, using best practices to ensure reliability and resilience. Clearly this all costs money and a Paypal donate link should be a given, hams are a stingy lot generally, but I am sure there will be some who feel they can contribute with real money, whilst others will contribute with time and effort (Thank you Brian, Jim, et al). There is still a way to go in terms of what could be described as "commercial infrastructure", which unfortunately is required in order to interoperate with the commercial world (aka the rest of the Internet). Brian has made a lot of progress in this regard, by setting up the not-for-profit entity, which is required in order to get an ASN, and will also be required in order to sign agreements with peers and transit providers. Other "requirements" such as a centralised point of contact website, rwhois server, etc are all being worked on and should be ready soon. At some point a set of procedures & policies will need to be created and published in order to interact with the Internet at large and also to protect our resource if prefixes are allocated in the manner that has been discussed. In answer to the criticism I saw concerning one person "controlling" all these addresses - why do you think the not-for-profit entity has been setup? Exactly so that this not the case anymore, once everything is in place our resource will be protected against such calamity's as Brian losing his position at UCSD, etc. The 44/8 resource we have is a fantastic legacy, lets not squander it. I have seen discussions from time to time in other network groups (NANOG in particular) where eyes have turned to focus on our resource. Unless it is managed effectively and utilised fully we risk losing it, which would be a real shame. Regards, Chris G1FEF