Early in the history of the internet, the powers that be granted amateur radio operators over 16 million IPv4 addresses. Now a proposal has emerged suggesting the same community be granted a substantial chunk of the IPv6 numberspace.
The proposal to give amateur radio operators some IPv6 emerged in an IETF draft that appeared in early November.
Sole author Preston Louis Ursini, who operates the Paducah Internet Exchange and participates in internet policy development processes, points out that amateur radio operators need an addressing system and the IPv4 bloc assigned to the community has done the job for years.
That bloc, 44/8, is a little controversial because Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC), the foundation that exists to support amateur radio and digital communication science and technology, sold a quarter of it to Amazon.com in 2019 for over $100 million.
ARDC gained access to 44/8 in 1981, a time when nobody had an inkling that IPv4 addresses would ever be in short supply and the sole delegator of IP addresses – internet pioneer Jon Postel – happily assigned them when he thought requests had merit.
Once the internet became popular and IPv4 became scarce, internet governance strengthened and regional internet registries (RIRs) came into being to oversee and develop policy for IP address allocation. RIRs still have that role today and now require would-be IP address users to justify their needs, possess appropriate structures, and meet other criteria. Generous grants of IP addresses, and capricious carve-outs of addresses for special purposes, are now very infrequent.
In his IETF draft, Ursini points out that amateur radio operators have built practices and procedures around 44/8, and that for various reasons it would be impractical for the community to use RIRs to acquire IPv6 for its future needs.
He nonetheless suggests that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) should reserve the 44::/16 bloc of IPv6 addresses and work with the RIRs to develop “a coordinated global policy framework” to make it all work.
As pointed out last week by George Michaelson, a senior R&D officer at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the five RIRs are currently working to update the policy that defines their lifecycle and roles.
“Against that backdrop, a request to the IETF for IANA to delegate a specific block – and to a specific organization – is likely to run straight into the process boundaries that govern the creation of new global registries,” he wrote.
In conversation with The Register, Michaelson said Ursini’s draft doesn’t represent a huge chunk of the IPv6 numberspace, which covers 2128 addresses. Ursini’s proposal asks for a mere 2112 addresses – five nonillion of the 340 undecillion addresses available under IPv6.
The suggestion is, however, unusual.
Michaelson thinks it’s nonetheless worth considering this idea, because the amateur radio community has a long history of doing interesting things that later become useful in other contexts. He also told us he thinks Ursini’s idea is running ahead of debate, and that the internet community will soon need to consider some matters – especially as humanity builds more networks in space and needs to consider how radio networks with lots of latency will interact with the rest of the internet. ®
Source: The register