I am heading up a project to construct a community wireless network covering all areas of Australia that wish to participate, and we have reached the conclusion that any effort spent creating a universally routable network based on IPv4 is a doomed strategy.
The project is being supported by the Australian Wireless Association (www.australianwireless.org), a not-for-profit member based organisation. At this stage we have arranged agreements with two Australian ISPs to allow us to interconnect with their IPv6 networks, one of which is 6bone connected. We are very happy with this situation, and have secured the access without any costs. We have also secured hardware to run as a border router to be co-located in the ISP's facilities. The next step is for us to acquire address space and an AS number so we can use the interconnection, however this is where we have hit issues. Our local IP addressing registrar, APNIC, is a purely commercial organisation and has no interest in assisting us, refusing to even let us plead our case. Our membership fees can cover the AU$1000 they charge for an AS number, but the AU$5000 per year membership fee required to get any sort of addressing is more than we can afford. The pricing structure of APNIC assumes you want IPv4 addressing, which we do not, and they have no options for IPv6 only. Given the vast unplumbed depths of IPv6 available this seems a little unfair. Is there address space made available for research purposes, or is there space set aside for not-for-profit use? Is there a registrar set up for research networks? We feel that we have something to offer the IPv6 community, by both providing users a broadband path directly to 6bone, rather than through long distance tunnels, and as we plan to implement many links as purely IPv6 it provides a potential demonstration of the next generation of networks. It also will reveal any issues with IPv6 over wireless. The network will provide a fixed cost connectivity option for people who may not be able to afford the costs of regular broadband internet access. It also has a strong following amongst the enthusiast community, and provides a genuine opportunity to test IPv6 in the wild in a large network with potentially thousands of users. It will be a best effort system; with efforts made to build a meshed structure to provide redundancy as we expect the wireless links to fail regularly (wireless is an inherently less stable technology when compared to traditional wired networks). I hope someone in the IPv6 community has a suggestion or can help us. Chris Martin
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