Not able to reply to the sibling comment from bsder, but yes, encryption is forbidden in the ham bands.
What vvanders is talking about, and it's a massive point of frustration for me too, is that all of the layer 2 open standards that have actual use are ancient. Like, we're supposed to feel lucky that we whave ARQ. Ridiculous.
It's not really anything to do with encryption or indecipherability, but all about spectral efficiency, and most of that really comes down to coding. I can pop open fldigi and generate a 64QAM signal really easily, but actually coding the data to ship over that pipe starts getting into some pretty arcane territory.
Think about just how good a modern cellphone is - 100+ megabit connection in the palm of your hand, competing for spectrum with hundreds or thousands of other devices, with a handset power of less than 1 watt (usually). There's nothing inherently magical about it, it's just not something that there's a lot of FOSS work around.
I've been working on deep diving on this a lot lately, I really think there should be more open source libraries around coding, but I have a funny feeling anyone who gets good at this gets snatched up by someone in the 3GPP consortium.
