Begin forwarded message: From: "Antonios Chariton (daknob)" &lt;daknob(a)daknob.net&gt; Subject: Re: [44net] A new era of IPv4 Allocations Date: 30 July 2021 at 14:18:24 CEST To: Ruben ON3RVH &lt;on3rvh(a)on3rvh.be&gt; And one can also say that using amateur radio frequencies makes no sense at all. Is that true? If you use 44 addresses on the Internet, then they are simply IPv4 addresses. There’s nothing special about them. It’s just that some privileged people that got a license can get free IPv4, while some other not-so-privileged people have to pay insane amounts of money to get them. Do we want ARDC to only support the use case of connecting people to the Internet and being a global ISP? We think that amateur radio has much more to offer than just “connect to the Internet with no NAT”. There are more use cases, and I am sad to see that people don’t want to accept this or help accommodate the people that have these use cases. Especially at a time where more than half of us belong to this category, and there’s no cost involved in doing so, nor danger of running out of IPv4 addresses. I still don’t understand why some people prefer to harm their colleagues (the majority even) by depriving them of resources, just because they don’t enjoy to do the same things as them. How would you feel if we proposed a total ban on all use of 44/8 on the Internet? No more BGP, no more LOAs, no more IPIP Mesh routing to the Internet, no PoPs. We turn all of it into an intranet. That would feel terrible to me if I just wanted free IPv4 and just because other (most!) people don’t want it, they decided to completely prevent this use case. I am telling you again: we use 1-5% of the IPv4 space. 99% of it is sitting idle, and not being used. Why do you insist on keeping such an expensive and valuable resource unused, if other people (most people?) want to use it? That sounds like a terrible decision. If we only used 1% of our RF spectrum, it would start to disappear and be gone very soon. Would you prefer that we lose anything above 50 MHz, just because you only like to use < 50 MHz? Why can’t we all accept that some people only like VHF, and some only like UHF, and some only like HF? Why do we only have to force people to use one band, if we have all of them available? I am really struggling to understand this logic. This is really beyond me. We prefer to have space sit there until the end of time, not used, instead of giving it to our colleagues and friends that want to use this. I am sorry if I don’t get it, but this seems crazy and insane to me. We are using 1% of the space, and instead of wanting to use more of it, we tell more than half our users to move away from it. Why? So we can use 0.5% of it then? How is this any good? Why would we like to use *less* space, if we are already “borderline using it”? I know a lot of you have networking experience and have worked in ISPs and know how valuable IPv4 is. But this is way beyond what most ISPs deal with. We have 48 *thousand* /24s! We have 192 /16’s! I’m willing to bet that we have more space than 99.99% of the ISPs out there (by definition too, since we hold 1/200th or so of the “globally unique" Internet). A commercial ISP with 5000 customers and a /24 needs to save every drop. On the other hand, we only use one drop of our ocean. We are privileged to have more IPs than 99.99% of everyone else right now. Why do you not like us to use it for amateur radio purposes and instead prefer to just keep it unused? What’s the point of it? This is like the argument that we should preserve IPv6 space and not give each LAN a /64. I think most people that claim this simply don’t understand the sheer volume of “2^64”. The human brain just isn’t good at wrapping around these types of numbers. But if you look at the mathematics behind it, then maybe you can understand this better. We have a car with a tank of gasoline, and we only want to use half a liter of it, and then every time we consume half a liter, we want to go back to the gas station and fill it up again. We have a range of 720km with this car, yet we only want to do 5 km at a time, and then go to the station. The TAC has not performed a poll, but instead we talked in 1:1 sessions with users and coordinators of these networks. If you feel like we should create a poll though, I imagine we could organize it and send one. Antonis