I've always wanted to play with 44net. I mean, I really have no idea what I expect to achieve... I feel like reviving the BBS network of the past would be counterproductive for the Advancement of the Radio Art... Yet, at the same time, relying on the internet isn't good for the resilience of communication in general. It seems that the 44.x allocation had good intentions, and it certainly seems that amateur radio pushed the advancement of internet technologies early on, but we have dropped the ball. We need something creative if we want to become relevant again.

So what are people planning on doing once a 56k mesh network exists? What kind of traffic will it carry?

On Feb 25, 2015 11:03 PM, "myyahoo@... [UniversalDigitalRadio]" <UniversalDigitalRadio@...> wrote:

 

Something that we need to influence when the UDRs start shipping in quantity. I have a 44.x net allocation for the old 56kbps network (I was last on there in 1998) in the Vancouver area but we may need to look at different routing mechanisms as mesh networking becomes a reality, and gateways to the network will be more varied and variable. Guess I'll have to study up on BGP. Good thing I work at a company that has a 'past' with BGP... Don't have a CCIE - yet...

I'm now in San Jose, CA, so I also need go write the local exams to get 'local' and confuse things less when we form a network here. Think I've said this before. :-)

If the political processes are not working, it may be because no one is interested in supporting and maintaining them. That may be fixed by offering to step up to the plate - but then again, there is frequency coordination... not been a lot of hope in that area. (We will need to push there too. ;-)

If the 44.x net progress has stagnated, new blood may be able to effect some change (politics notwithstanding). Some of us associated with this project have been associated with packet radio since the early days and may be able to effect some gentle pressure among friends to help things move along. If not, there are alternatives (e.g., 10.x net and NAT/PAT) that can get us running without employing the 44.x net, at least initially, if we need IPv4 address space, and IPv6 is wide open. Getting a piece of 44.x allocated to this effort would be another alternative. We don't have to clean up the whole 16M address space, if we were to get a 64K slice we'd serve the continent for a millennium or three. :-)

BTW - we're really pushing to use IPv6 here (the on-air footprint could be critical to performance, with IPv6 header compression), where one subnet is the size of the *entire* IPv4 space, but we'll likely need some IPv4 space for a while to tide us over for maybe the next decade until the Internet becomes more IPv6 aware. Some 6-to-4 conversion will be likely to boost performance while retaining compatibility. We only really need numerous IPv4 addresses for inbound-to-ham-net connections, PAT can help solve outbound - but we need to control those inbound connections, to prevent non-ham-legal content from traversing the ham links. Software for this already exists, in one form or another.

- Richard, VE7CVS (/W6)