(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!
Is the intent to get class E routed on the public internet, or just make it available in private networks?
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 ;)
We're interested in routing it on the public Internet, although I also know that some people are using it internally and that one of the two older public proposals about this suggested that it might be better as new private address space.
One way that I've been thinking about the reachability issue is by analogy to
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.
Comcast started rolling out IPv6 across their network a long time ago. They hit 100% support on their broadband network in 2014. They run a lot of the own stuff on IPv6, such as on-demand video on their set-top boxes. I think any home modem/router that they support that did not support IPv6 hit EOL long ago and was replaced.
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.
Comcast ran out of RFC1918 addressing to manage all the devices on their network (think cable modems/set top boxes/routers/everything) and had a massively segmented network setup.
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.
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.
----
Update: I found Wave's peering page's IPv6 status page and it remains unchanged since 2011 (and possibly since 2008). Wow.
> I want IPv6 so I can stop having to faff around with NAT.
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.
IPv6's has a fixed subnet size of 64-bits[1]. A router needs its own subnet, ergo everyone gets their own 64-bit address range. ISPs cannot give each customer a single IPv6 address because that would require each customer to have a single device connected directly to their router with no router in the CPE - basically like how dial-up used to work. There's no demand for a service like that.
RIPE just has a rule about only having ISPs hand out those /64s there is nothing to prevent someone internally to then split that /64 into smaller chunks to hand out to internal clients. Thats the would point of a subnet!
2001:: is a 16 bit prefix in which every single customer could get a /48, i.e. you could allocate 65k subnets of 18.45 quint addresses on your network and give one of those to everyone with an ipv4 address and not run out, and that's still only 1/65536th of the total address space.
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).
It is not true that an ISP cannot give each customer just a single IPv6 address. The Linux box I use as a router gets a single (i.e., /128) address from Spectrum Cable on its upstream interface, and it has to explicitly ask for a separate /64 prefix to advertise on the local interface (this is called prefix delegation, PD).
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.
> The Linux box I use as a router gets a single (i.e., /128) address from Spectrum Cable on its upstream interface, and it has to explicitly ask for a separate /64 prefix to advertise on the local interface
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.
Performative cynicism + speaking hypothetically about past events = I'd downvote it twice if I could. In reality very very few ISPs are giving one IPv6 address per customer. ISPs are greedy but they're not wantonly cruel.
> "In reality very very few ISPs are giving one IPv6 address per customer"
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.
Do you know about Hurricane Electric's free IPv6 tunnel broker? www.tunnelbroker.com. I have used it for a very long time, and it has been very stable and reliable. The only technical requirement is that you have control of a globally routable IPv4 address where you can set up a tunnel endpoint. I.e., "carrier grade NAT" (a contradiction in terms) won't suffice.
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.
> Do you know about Hurricane Electric's free IPv6 tunnel broker?
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!
Unfortunately, streaming sites like Netflix block access from HE tunnels, because they could be used to skirt around region controls (like VPNs).
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.
My friend/co-worker signed up for Wave thinking that it supported IPv6, their websites and marketing is so incredibly fragmented...
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.
Maybe not. Google says their traffic is now at 30% IPv6, and climbing at 5%/year.[1]
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.
So it's taken 25 years to get to ~30% adoption. And a few years ago APNIC reported [0] that the rate was going down - I haven't found an updated report.
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.
Considering that World IPv6 Launch was 2012-06-06 and nothing really happened before, it makes more sense to say that it has taken 8 years to get to ~30% adoption.
I don't think you get to roll back the odometer and start counting again just because nobody adopted a technology from the start. That's not to say that adoption won't take off at some point - a lot of technologies experience exponential growth after a slow start. But the longer it takes to get started, the bigger the risk that something better will come along.
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.
What was the reason why do much money was required at this specific time?
British businesses might have been natural customers for this address space, since the UK IDD code is 00 44.
I would gladly pay $50 per IP for what is almost the only virgin address space going, if I had been offered.
Diligent address space title management including some genuinely tough identification requirements, managed by any top tier corporate actions specialist, could have multiplied the value several times immediately, and then there would have been increased inflation rates applicable to the range precisely because of this management.
Its been appreciating slowly for the last 5 years, I’ve seen deals in the $20-25 range throughout that time, and a few larger contiguous blocks going for a little more but not $50/ea.
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?
> 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 :)
I own a /24 registered back in the 90's. This is a "legacy" registration predating ARIN, meaning I pay no fees and never have. I have people emailing me about it now and then, but haven't sold it yet. I am using it for some dev servers.
Yeah, that's been my theory for awhile: that IPv4 addresses are effectively a currency, and that a move to IPv6 would devalue that currency. A disproportionate amount of that currency is held by companies and institutions based in the United States, and in many cases they're the same companies and institutions that one might otherwise would expect to be responsible for much of the work of transitioning to IPv6.
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.
Sorry for the stupid question but each time I got allocated an IPv6 address, I was allocated a /124 subnetwork (16 IPs) and not a single IP. How is IPv6 not going to be in shortage if even a small random actor like me gets allocated many IPs for each server?
You've got the incentives backwards. An organizational push for IPv6 would allow a company to free up their IP addresses and sell (/lease) them, actually realizing that valuation.
I winced when I first read this because I thought they had sold the whole block, however reading that it was a subset I think ultimately this is a win for amateur radio and radio telecommunications more broadly because of the endowment it produced.
The pivotal event was the Nortel-Microsoft deal where a court overruled the IANA hippies and said that IP blocks look like property and quack like property so they must be property.
And thank goodness to! The only way these IP addresses are getting efficiently used (now) is there is an actual value and market for IPv4.
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.
Even if this was the case (efficient market hypothesis is a dogma...) it could have been better if the money went to the internet orgs and could have been used to incentivise the migration off of ipv4. See the problems in eg the idea of all carbon trading credits being owned by the historically biggest CO2 emitter companies.
Dogma or not, there's always some cost to giving up addresses so nobody would give them up for free. A transfer tax to help pay for the transition would be an interesting idea but I don't know if IANA or the RIRs could plausibly implement that.
Publishing the private key only allows for spoofing, not decrypting, unless you fail to use ephemeral Diffie-Hellman, which seems to be the default for most clients nowadays.
Let's hope no IoT company is stupid enough to send customer data over this. Stuff like LoRa is very popular these days, but they are low bandwidth. Would not be surprising if a company decides that MVNO providers are too expensive and rolls their own communications infrastructure.
With few exceptions, all commercial use of amateur bands is prohibited, and licensing is by operator rather than by device. So for an IoT provider to run into this issue they'd have to have much larger problems on their hands as well.
It's a law governing the ham radio bands' usage in general. No encrypted/obscured communications. In fact, you have to regularly, unambiguously, and publicly identify yourself every ten minutes if I recall.
Well, you're using an extremely limited global resource. Blasting your voice around the world with 1,500 watts behind it is something that not everybody can do at once. So we need some sort of internationally agreeable rule set. The compromises include no encryption, required licensing, individual identification, no political speech, and others. But what we get in return is pretty cool: I can talk to somebody in Japan in a truly peer-to-peer fashion, using nothing but our own hardware in our own homes and the natural electromagnetic properties of the atmosphere.
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.
Your conversations aren't just not encrypted, they're totally public. That's unacceptable for most communications.
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.
Eh, this is not exactly true. Digital traffic, even encrypted, is easily recognizable unless the protocol is explicitly designed to look like noise (which is very uncommon/unheard of). It's true that encrypted data is (ideally) distributed like noise, but digital noise doesn't necessarily look or sound at all like ambient RF noise and there is also usually some non-encrypted packet structure wrapping the encrypted payload by necessity. You can very easily identify on e.g. DMR or P25 by ear if you know what to listen for, encrypted or not.
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.
Interesting historical note: AMPRNet was one of the first times that the Internet's NIC had to decide if an ambiguously categorized entity belonged in .org, .net, or would have its own top-level domain (in this case .ampr)
So we've now had several interesting cases of how breaking changes to something popular (even foundational) are made and how that works out:
- 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.
>everything got thrown into IPv6 without solving the two problems that actually matters
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.
For HTTP? Basically just multihoming. For everything else? Multiplexing streams, multihoming, reliable datagrams, out of order delivery, in order delivery of datagrams, resistance to SYN floods, etc. It's basically a swiss-army knife transport protocol. By far the biggest drawback of SCTP is lack of widespread support. Linux and the BSDs have it implemented in the kernel but Windows and macOS only have third party implementations. It can be implemented in userspace, but now you have to tunnel all of it over UDP instead of just native SCTP and now you need to worry about separate userspace implementations conflicting by trying to use the same UDP port if you want to host it as a server.
It's the new folks just having a wildly arrogant view of their new protocol. Ipv6 had everything and the kitchen sink thrown into it and made only token efforts at ipv4 co-existence. Plus the endless hype of ipv4 not being available. What they really meant was FREE ipv4 addresses won't be available, but between spending $5K to get a small block or re-doing your entire network to ipv6 -> plenty of people would rather pay the $5K!
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.
Ironically, the biggest argument in favor of IPv6 adoption is the massive debacle IPv6 has been. It's virtually guaranteed that we won't ever get a successor to IPv6, and since IPv4 exhaustion has pushed enough adoption of IPv6 that we can't get rid of IPv6 either.. we're stuck with it.
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.
> The bottom line is that the sale netted us about US $108M, and we expect to grant at least US $5 million per year on an ongoing basis, depending on how our investments perform, to a wide variety of Internet and amateur radio digital communication projects. To date we have made about $2.5 million in grants, so we're only getting started."
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.
This seems like a prudent decision on the part of the ARDC, and potentially a good boost to lots of interesting radio-adjacent projects.
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.
Without going into too much depth, there was considerable controversy over this planned sale because of questions about ARDC's authority to make decisions involving this IP space (ownership of the IP block was never really assigned to ARDC per se but rather assumed due to lack of another clear owner), some historic bad blood between some amateur radio groups and ARDC (involving in part ARDC's administration of this IP space), and due to a perceived conflict of interest involving the ARDC board of directors. This was a big enough and loud enough issue for a while that it's kind of odd to see any announcement of this transaction being closed that doesn't mention the upset when it was first proposed.
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.
> On the other hand, maybe the endowment will allow them to hire a competent staff...
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.
A considerable controversy exists over the fact that the IPs were allocated to the global amateur radio community to be self-administered, but due to the sale the 044/8 block is now administered by ARIN. The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans.
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.
> The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans.
Yep, HAMNET[1] had to renumber parts of their network, which isn't a lot of fun when your routers are on antenna towers.
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.
Presumably use them for AWS. Amazon bought part of the 18 block from MIT (another class A owner) awhile back and allocated the purchased IPs for that use.
99 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadhttps://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!
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.
----
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:
http://as11404.net/ipv6.html
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.
[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
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.
What was the reason why do much money was required at this specific time?
British businesses might have been natural customers for this address space, since the UK IDD code is 00 44.
I would gladly pay $50 per IP for what is almost the only virgin address space going, if I had been offered.
Diligent address space title management including some genuinely tough identification requirements, managed by any top tier corporate actions specialist, could have multiplied the value several times immediately, and then there would have been increased inflation rates applicable to the range precisely because of this management.
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.
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.
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.
See: https://gade.us/thesis/
- 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.
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
https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
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.