Yeah this thread kinda went off the rails. Originally we WERE talking about global Internet BGP. That is what the folks need that are using net-44 for IRLP, Allstar, Echolink, D-Star and various types of DMR. 44-net addresses that need access to and from the global Internet.

It took my local data center provider about three weeks to set up advertising one of my /23. Mostly waiting for all of their upstream providers to accept the newly advertised routes. Vultr.com has a very slick set of tools allowing one to get it going in a few hours, assuming proper license from ARDC is obtained. Neither one charges anything extra for doing that.

But it is nothing anyone here can do on their own from home. Basically it requires support from a large data center or ISP. All of my blocks are globally routable, courtesy of my data center providers. I run an implementation of OpenVPN on a Linux VM to pass individual addresses (/32) to client IRLP nodes.

Please understand that in the topology I am proposing (and have proposed several times in the past) you don't need to do that as an individual, it is left to local groups or ARDC to do that.

You would have a local router in some datacenter that advertises some segment of the net-44 space on internet (or preferably, the ISP does the advertising and just statically routes the incoming traffic to you). Then in that datacenter you have a router that allows incoming VPN connections from small routers at the individual's homes or repeater locations. Those individual routers talk BGP as well, but that only travels between their router and the datacenter router. It is used to tell the datacenter router what subnet(s) of the net-44 space each one wants to receive. It does not influence what happens on the internet side, there it always receives the full /16../24 that is advertised on internet.

Now, the individuals and repeaters can build radiolinks between them, they will form the AMPRnet over radio for that region. Traffic will (with proper setup) select those radiolinks first, the link to the datacenter is used for traffic towards internet or when there is no radiolink available.

ARDC would arrange there is a full mesh (or almost full mesh) of GRE tunnels between all those datacenter routers where BGP is running as well. That means that redundancy can be built into the network, so you would not be dependent on a single router when you don't like that. You could setup a VPN to more than one datacenter router and again BGP will arrange that you will receive your network traffic, at least the AMPRnet traffic, at any time even when your main router is down.

In my opinion that is a much better solution than the IPIP mesh we have now, which is completely static and has your gateway system as a single point of failure. Also it requires a mostly static IP, and possibility to forward the protocol 4 traffic to the gateway system. This is ever harder to get going on a modern internet connection that has a dynamic address and maybe even CGNAT. A VPN system does not suffer from that.

Rob