Cory Doctorow, blogging from the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies
Conference,
notes that the NoCat folks are proposing to hand out slices of the
10.*.*.* network-space to people who operate radios that use NoCatAuth.
Interesting idea – but there are a few problems:
(1) You’ve got a limited IP Address space. (2) No one considers you the
authority, so others are going to use the space as well. (3) How do you
deal with rogues? (4) It is going to require a huge VPN – or at least
IP-in-IP tunnelling system to allow for routing between nodes in the
private space over the public internet, along with all the routing
headaches associated. These are not small problems.
It is an interesting idea, though, akin to Sputnik’s roaming
capabilities – by placing authentication databases at a number of
centralized points, Sputnik already provides this free roaming
capability, without the need for tunnelling or dedicated IP space.
We’re solving somewhat different problems – Sputnik for example, is not
built to give each wireless user his own unique IP address; rather it is
allocated from the pool that each Gateway delivers, and therefore some
of the whiz-bang routing features of the NoCat proposal aren’t
implemented. However, at the same time, the smaller problem set allows
us to avoid the big problems mentioned above.
Related posts:
The NoCat people aren’t going to be handing out *any* address space. They don’t own any.
Giving out net-10 addresses is worthless; much to all of the backbone won’t pass packets with those addresses… so they’ll have to NAT the users anyway.
There *are* 70-100 Class-A networks which could be allocated for this purpose — and there’s even precedences: Net 44 was allocated for Amateur Packet Radio some years ago.. although I think this predated ARIN.
But if the top 5 names in wireless network were convinced that this was the best solution, and wrote a paper on it, it might be that ARIN could be convinced to allocate space for it.
But, given the problems that Ricochet had getting penetration, and the fact that the nationwide CDPD infrastructure only got a handful of class-B’s, I don’t think it’s gonna be *easy*…