6 Sep
2017
6 Sep
'17
3:14 p.m.
IP allocations are obviously not the same type of resource as our frequency
bands. But, even if they were, this would still be a worthwhile discussion
to have. If we had the opportunity to trade-in a fraction of one of our
seldom used bands in exchange for much more room in one of the crowed
bands, wouldn't that be a worthwhile discussion to have for the betterment
of amateur radio and it's long term growth?
As both the holder of 44net's largest end-user allocation, and a long time
advocate for experimental networking, I'm very well aware of how valuable
having this allocation is to our community. However, both our utilization
and our efficiency in its utilization are abysmal and nowhere near the
standards we hold ourselves to for our RF resources. By making efficiency
improvements in the way we allocate space, we may end up determining that
44/9 (half of our current space) may still be orders of magnitude more than
our peak usage will ever be between now and the time when IPv4 space falls
out of favor.
Getting this community to agree on anything can be worse than pulling
teeth. ;) So, rather than talking about money or "selling" our valuable
resources, I think it would be helpful if we focused the discussion on what
resources we would consider valuable enough to trade a small piece of our
space for. In the end, we may decide that nothing is worth it, but I think
that this would be the best way to figure it out.
First of all, since we already have a global amateur radio registry for
IPv4 space, I think a large block of IPv6 space would be a worthwhile trade
for a small piece of 44/8. The current version of AMPRnet may not ever
support IPv6, but if it made any sense at all to get us a /8 in the early
80s to support the future of amateur radio innovation, then we should have
done the same for IPv6 well over a decade ago.
Personally, I've always wondered how we missed the boat on getting a
top-level domain name in the early days of DNS. Getting our own TLD makes
a lot of sense since our call signs are already a globally unique namespace
we could use with it. DNS is only meant to make addresses easier to
remember, but by standardizing our namespace in a TLD, we would also have
the advantage of a global directory that makes the services you want to
make public easily discoverable. I can see such a thing becoming very
valuable to our community in the future as amateur radio continues to merge
with the digital world. If we had setup a registry to handle it, that
technical advantage may have granted us a TLD in the early days. But now
that they've changed the rules for TLDs, it would almost certainly require
more resources than a group of hams could manage. However, if the concept
is valuable enough to us, it may be worth taking advantage of an
opportunity to trade a small part of our unused IPv4 space for it.
Cory Johnson, NQ1E
HamWAN Puget Sound