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Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
- drmpeg 6y agoThe precise numbers are 4,194,304 * $26.13 = $109,597,164 - broker fee of $545,260 = $109,051,904 net.
- zaroth 6y agoSo that makes the current IPv4 address space total market cap ~$112 billion.
- aidenn0 6y agoThere are roughly 20 class 8s worth of special addresses, which reduces that by $10 billion or so.
- Ekaros 6y agoI wish I could sell parts of my 127/8...
- metalliqaz 6y agoit's not yours, it's mine!
- schoen 6y agoI'm working on a project with John Gilmore to make those special addresses usable. https://github.com/schoen/unicast-extensions 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!
- mitchs 6y agoIs 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 ;)
- schoen 6y agoWe'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 https://blog.cloudflare.com/fixing-reachability-to-1-1-1-1-globally/ 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.
- ConcernedCoder 6y agobroker fee of $545,260 boy am I in the wrong business... I'm imagining something like: "Hey you want to buy?" ... "Yes!"... cha ching!
- jonas21 6y agoMeanwhile, here I am thinking, "Only 0.5%? Where were you when I sold my house?"
- rswail 6y agoIs there any wonder that moving to IPv6 is delayed? 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.
- manquer 6y agoApple and Comcast probably can use them. 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.
- tzs 6y agoComcast 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.
- ArchOversight 6y agoComcast 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago> Apple has long had IPv6 support in their operating systems, so I don't think they have been trying to hold it back either. And Microsoft has supported IPv6 since Windows 2000: https://news.microsoft.com/2000/03/15/microsoft-announces-ipv6-technical-preview-for-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.net/ipv6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110102140910/http://as11404.ne... Live: http://as11404.net/ipv6.html http://as11404.net/ipv6.html
- rhombocombus 6y agoI 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.
- fulafel 6y agoAnyone have pointers to the history of IP addresses becoming tradeable, as opposed to just being allocations and up to registrar to reallocate?
- jrockway 6y agoIt appears to have started in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
- wmf 6y agoThe 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.
- temp667 6y agoAnd 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.
- fulafel 6y agoEven 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.
- wmf 6y agoDogma 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.
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoIs TLS legal over AMPRnet?
- tomfanning 6y agoNot over licensed RF links in most countries, unless you publish the private key.
- himinlomax 6y agoPublishing 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.
- lima 6y agoYep, TLS with forward secrecy is not legal to use on ham RF links. Same with SSH.
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoLet'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.
- jcrawfordor 6y agoWith 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.
- jasonjayr 6y agoNot a HAM, nor any expert by any means, but IIRC, LoRa + the Wifi Bands (2.4ghz/5.0ghz) permit encryption. It's only the HAM bands that forbid encryption.
- scroot 6y agoInteresting 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) See: https://gade.us/thesis/ https://gade.us/thesis/
- cletus 6y agoSo 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. I honestly don't know how this will ever happen.
- MertsA 6y ago>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.
- xxpor 6y agoSCTP-over-UDP is still totally viable.
- anderspitman 6y agoWhat do you see as the main advantages of SCTP over QUIC?
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- ed25519FUUU 6y ago> 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.
- leoedin 6y agoThis 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.
- CydeWeys 6y agoFor their (and their mission's) sake, I hope they treat it like an endowment, amend their charter now to lock it up, and then only use the proceeds.
- drmpeg 6y agoYou can read about their investments here: https://www.ampr.org/about/legal/ https://www.ampr.org/about/legal/ At the bottom of the page are the audited financial statement and tax return for 2019.
- jcrawfordor 6y agoWithout 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.
- j_walter 6y ago> 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.
- Glanford 6y agoA 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.
- jonnydubowsky 6y agoWhat will Amazon do with the AMPRNet addresses?
- nixgeek 6y agoSpeculating: They have a very impressive YoY % growth rate in their AWS business and likely chew through a /10 per year for IP addresses within that.
- yftsui 6y agoIt’s already being used by ec2 in the us-east-1 and us-west-2 regions. https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
- politelemon 6y ago> us-east-1 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.
- OminousWeapons 6y agoPresumably 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.