Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
southgatearc.org
southgatearc.org
Overall I think the sale was the right thing to do, but it is the fruit of a poisoned tree to some extent, and there will be ongoing questions about whether or not ARDC should really be in control of these funds. I am personally most just concerned about ARDC's ability to competently manage such a large endowment, since historically they've been a fairly low-activity group with some odd internal dynamics and a bit of a rift with some other amateur radio groups. On the other hand, maybe the endowment will allow them to hire a competent staff and become much more involved in promoting digital amateur radio.
Does that ever really happen? If they are competent enough to know they need a better staff that's one thing, but if they are already incompetent they will just blow through the endowment with nothing to show for it.
There could have been a legitimate discussion on whether the amateur radio community really needed some 16M IP addresses and if a partial sale of the resource could have benefited the community more, but any such discussion was denied when the ARDC decided to do backroom deals with IPs they might not legally have had ownership over.
Still, $108 million is a lot more than the 'couple of million' to $50m rumours that were floating about at the time of sale, hopefully they can do some good with the money and buy back some goodwill. Let's just hope the wholesale of prices of IPv4 addresses doesn't rise too much leading to another /10 sale, or if it does that they sell off their own blocks instead of the blocks allocated to the rest of the world.
Yep, HAMNET[1] had to renumber parts of their network, which isn't a lot of fun when your routers are on antenna towers.
ARDC is funding only US entities at this time: https://www.ampr.org/giving/
[1]: https://hamnetdb.net
Assuming an average $25/address, that's $400m/class A.
Some of the organizations that own a class A:
Apple, Ford, Softbank, Daimler, Prudential, Comcast.
Softbank needs the money and the others wouldn't sniff at $300m+.
Not sure how long the 100m odd addresses would last though.
Also Comcast may have to invest more in NAT grade infra if they sell significant chunk of their Class A allocation so it may not make sense for them.
There may be some class A owners who are trying to hold back IPv6 so they can make money off their class A, but Comcast isn't one of them.
Apple has long had IPv6 support in their operating systems, so I don't think they have been trying to hold it back either.
Ford, Softbank, Daimler, and Prudential? It is not immediately obvious to me if they could do anything to hold it back even if they wanted to.
They rolled out IPv6 because it flattened that network again, and instead of worrying about being in the right segment for reachability everything now gets a globally unique IP address. It massively simplified their internal management.
And Microsoft has supported IPv6 since Windows 2000: https://news.microsoft.com/2000/03/15/microsoft-announces-ip....
I understand that LTE networks are exclusively IPv6, ditto "5G".
My frustration with IPv6 is that my home ISP (Wave Broadband's DOCSIS service) is still IPv4 and they still have no plans to roll-out IPv6 even though Wave's WaveG service has been IPv6 for as long as I can remember. I understand the cause of this is because Wave's network is incredibly hetereogenous because Wave's business-model was to expand by buying-up smaller regional cablecos but to retain their infrastructure (and talent) compared to Comcast's approach of asset-stripping (bad for employees, but good for customers...).
I want IPv6 so I can stop having to faff around with NAT. I'd love to be able to RDP-in directly to my desktop at home without having to pay companies like TeamViewer and Splashtop.
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Update: I found Wave's peering page's IPv6 status page and it remains unchanged since 2011 (and possibly since 2008). Wow.
Compare:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110102140910/http://as11404.ne...
Live:
What makes you think your ISP will give you more than one IP even when they are no longer in short supply? If it's something that has value to you, it's something they will want to be paid for.
[1] See https://www.ripe.net/about-us/press-centre/understanding-ip-... . I note that there is a lot of misinformation and badly-informed blog posts in the top search results for "ipv6 subnet size" like this one, ugh: https://www.crucial.com.au/blog/2011/04/15/ipv6-subnet-cheat... - which is wrong because IPv6 simply doesn't have 128-bit-sized subnet option (whereas you can have a 32-bit sized subnet in IPv4, which is how most residential ISPs/CPEs are configured).
God, I knew the IPv6 space was insanely large, but Jesus h, man.
128 bits is a lot.
(the /64 as the physical subnet allows using hardware MAC addresses and RNG temporary/private addresses instead of needing DHCP/etc).
So it's certainly possible for an ISP to give a customer just one IPv6 address. I'm not sure, but I think there is no rule that prefixes obtained with PD must be /64's. They could in principle give you a /126 or /127 to limit you to just a few hosts on your LAN, and charge to give you anything better. This would break stateless autoconfiguration but it would still work with DHCPv6.
Your best workaround is still www.tunnelbroker.com, HE's free IPv6 tunnel service.
Ask for a /56! Spectrum in Los Angeles hands out /56s, and I understand many other residential IPv6 ISPs do as well. You get your own 8 bits worth of subnets on top of /64 for easy SLAAC address assignment. This works "for free" not only because the IPv6 address space is large enough to do this, but more importantly because IPv6 does NOT have any fixed subnet sizes - routing is hierarchical and subnet assignment is transparent. /64 is just the size used by SLAAC address auto-configuration, another bit of IPv6 magic.
Thank you so very much for NOS, which was my very first introduction to IP over packet and what initially got me interested in amateur radio (going on 30 years ago!) and is, in part, what led to me initially getting licensed and drawn into the world of networking at a young age.
73,
N9WWV
--
P.S. Welcome to HN!
In actual reality, global IPv6 adoption is at ~33% [0, 1], so I'd say this is, at best, a premature and naive presumption. ISPs actively engage in rent-seeking, and resource scarcity is another contributing factor. In-short, there's nothing in OPs comment that warrants the downvotes.
[0] - https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html [1] - https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/resources/our-thinking/state-of...
I still use HE's tunnel even though Spectrum Cable has provided good native IPv6 service for several years. Ping times over HE are just as good as native Spectrum, probably because everybody peers at the same place in Los Angeles.
The only problem with HE is that Netflix is clamping down on VPNs, and they consider a HE tunnel to be a VPN. So my home router advertises the native Spectrum prefix with a higher priority than the HE prefix.
My own frustration with IPv6 is that virtually no public hotspots support it. My Verizon phone does, so I often use it as a hotspot even when public WiFi is available.
I was aware of it, but I could swear that I heard news a couple of years ago that they shut it down due to decreased demand, but thank you for letting me know it's still running. I'll see if I can use it!
My ISP (RCN in Chicago) doesn't support IPv6 either. I tried HE, but ran into the above issue. Now I'm seriously considering getting an IPv6 block directly from ARIN (and paying the few hundred a year fees) to use with HE tunnels, to work around the Netflix block.
Would love to find a cheaper solution though.
We were working on some IPv6 projects that require IPv6 connectivity, and he didn't want to faff about with a tunnel or something along those lines, so he cancelled his Wave account and switched to Comcast.
Wave lost a customer due to not supporting IPv6... it's high time that ISP's started getting on-board.
Any internet service you want to be widely available will need to be dual-stack as long as we are alive.
Worldwide, Google is undercounting, because they are blocked in China. Google claims that China is 0.27% IPv6, but actually China is around 55%, according to APNIC. Policy goal in China is all IPv6 by 2025.
In 2005 the US government mandated that all their computers be v6 connected by 2008. [1] This year they updated the mandate to 80% by 2025. [2]
I learned networking in college in 1996 and I remember v6 coming up but so far I've never had to use it and chances are that I'll be able to retire still getting away with only working with v4.
[0] https://blog.apnic.net/2018/05/21/what-drives-ipv6-deploymen... [1] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/omb/memoranda/fy... [2] https://www.cio.gov/assets/resources/internet-protocol-versi...
It'll be $50/address in a year, $100/address in 2022; I'm sure of it.
Methinks now would be a very good time to invest^wspeculate in IPv4 addresses - I reckon it will be the next Bitcoin bubble-type event and likely even make it to the silly segment of TV news, with lampoonably inaccurate explanations of what an IPv4 address is to the general public.
You can monitor secondary market prices through RIPE fairly easily. What’s leading you to be sure it will increase 400% in the next 24 months?
Honestly? Just a hunch. But also looking at trends on IPv4Auctions.com (now auctions.ip4.global), a few years ago blocks would go for $7/address, now they're $25/address - and as demand for IPv4 addresses won't be going away[1] and supply will only decrease (barring rare gluts of supply like AMPRnet's when a major /21 or /16 is broken down into smaller blocks to auction off).
I think $100/address would be an upper-bound though, because at that point it's likely cheaper to finally invest in IPv6 deployment, including issuing new CPE than it costs to retain IPv4.
[1] If an ISP could have deployed IPv6 by now then they would have done 5+ years ago. Any ISPs that haven't already deployed IPv6 by now (or even 5 years ago) must be facing some massive internal hurdles, such as incompetent management who see it as a massive and unnecessary technical expense when CG-NAT is good-enough for the majority of their customers - or have a hetereogenous network that would be a nightmare to bring up-to-code on any reasonable timescale). The only way these ISPs will upgrade is when the cost of operating an IPv4 network becomes unbearable - hence why I want to see IPv4 address costs skyrocket :)
Meanwhile, Asia has a relative scarcity of IPv4 addresses and so is (as far as I know) ahead of the curve because their incumbents have less to lose.
There's about 2^33 people on the planet, so that still supports about 2^91 nodes nodes per person.
A shortage isn't likely.
- Perl 5 to Perl 6. I think this was an unmitigated disaster. 20 years ago Perl 5 had a lot of users. I'm pretty sure it's completely irrelevant now;
- Python 2 to Python 3. It's been almost 12 years and we still have Python 2. Personally I think a lot of bad decisions were made here, like getting rid of s' and u' string prefixes (before adding it back in Python 3.3). Unfortunately I think Python 3 is now in a state where each minor release makes language changes.
Which brings us to IPv6. It's been 25 years and we're still asking "are we there yet?" The biggest lesson for me is that IPv6 is a classic example of the Second System Syndrome.
Faced with the limited prospect of making future breaking changes, everything got thrown into IPv6 without solving the two problems that actually matters (ie roaming, reliable UDP). The only real problem with IPv4 is address space exhaustion. And we've had decades of NAT to kick that can down the street with probably decades to come.
I honestly don't know how this will ever happen.
That would arguably be much better suited to a layer 4 solution. SCTP has solved both of those problems and is now 2 decades old. I have in the past harped on what a shame it is that QUIC was built, basically reinventing features of SCTP poorly. SCTP could still be viable over the open internet on IPv6 if it's done before the inevitable protocol ossification happens on IPv6 just like IPv4 when middlebox vendors can't be bothered to support passing traffic other than TCP, UDP, and ICMP.
The irony - despite seemingly unlimited ipv6 addresses my home internet is now a mess of randomly changing ipv6 addresses... I feel like I'm back in dynamic DNS / NAT days (ipv4 + port).
The s' and u' string prefix issue in python is an absolute embarrassment. They had a perfect / clear upgrade path that would allow stuff to still work with python 2. In their Unicode purity campaign they tried to force everyone to 3 by making it a total PIA to work with 2 still (such a similar story with ipv6).
Folks were like peace out for at least 5 years until they started bending a bit (also ascii handling for HTTP stuff got super annoying). Once they backed off it got a lot better on the transition.
Yes, I do wish we'd realized this 15 years ago, when it might have still been possible to throw IPv6 away and start over. But we didn't, so here we are.
Provided they stay true to the goal, and don’t capture the money for themselves via “administration costs”, this this is probably a good thing for amateur radio in the long term.
Hopefully they can maintain their organisational culture. Large amounts of money can be very damaging to organisations which aren't set up to handle it.
https://www.ampr.org/about/legal/
At the bottom of the page are the audited financial statement and tax return for 2019.
AWS charges $1/month or $12/year to sit on an IP address unused. This price / value pressure has freed up a TON of address space and pushed down pricing signals on a lot of ipv4 usage (ie, you can say is it worth $300M to buy a class A or maybe we should spend $200M to get IPv6 going.
Everything's in US East 1. I sometimes wonder if it's a disproportionately larger estate that has even has its own gravity, compared to all of the others.
https://github.com/schoen/unicast-extensions
(note that most of the content in this repository was written by Dave Taht, who was running this project before; he got patches merged in the mainline Linux kernel that causes it to accept 0/8 and 240/4 as regular unicast addresses)
If anyone would like to talk more about any aspect of this, please get in touch!
I've seen docker configs squatting on chunks of class E space for the local bridge interface, presumably because Linux takes it, and it doesn't usually clash with the landmines in rfc 1918 space.
I know of at least one company using class E as the new 8/8 ;)
One way that I've been thinking about the reachability issue is by analogy to
https://blog.cloudflare.com/fixing-reachability-to-1-1-1-1-g...
Many organizations used 1.1.1.1 as a test address (in addition to other uses of 1/8), so once Cloudflare started working to get a public service up there, it had to perform various reachability tests and also set up a way for people to report problems. This is apparently an ongoing process to this day, but Cloudflare's hard work helped make reachability that was initially patchy get asymptotically better. I think we can much do the same with other previously unassigned address ranges.
boy am I in the wrong business... I'm imagining something like: "Hey you want to buy?" ... "Yes!"... cha ching!
It's only the HAM bands that forbid encryption.
If encryption were allowed on the ham bands, they would probably become dominated by general purpose digital communications; likely to the exclusion of their current purpose.
Take everything you do on a phone call, over SMS, and over the Internet. Subtract anything personal, anything business related, anything involving copyright (e.g. watching a movie or listening to a song, even if you own it), and anything you don't want associated with your identity (anonymous blogging). Also, I forgot to mention that broadcasting is also disallowed. You couldn't just start telling poetry on a frequency without regard to anybody who may or may not be listening. You also can't use the bands for any commercial purpose.
Anyway, after subtracting all that, what your left with is what people use the band for today. Which, I suppose, could still be considered "general purpose." But when I said "general purpose digital communications," what I had in mind were the sorts of things you use email or the web for. By volume, mostly music, videos, porn, ads, and private business operations.
We don't want people to deliberately broadcast noise, but encrypted data is indistinguishable from noise, we can't allow that either.
The restrictions have nothing to do with preventing people from transmitting noise. Transmitting encrypted on amateur radio stations was originally not allowed because of espionage concerns in the earlier days of amateur radio, and has stuck around largely to prevent abuse. Allowing unencrypted but encoded transmissions makes sense in that context, as long as the protocol is published.