UK ISP PlusNet Testing Carrier-Grade NAT Instead of IPv6

judgecorp writes "Faced with the shortage of IPv4 addresses and the failure of IPv6 to take off, British ISP PlusNet is testing carrier-grade network address translation CG-NAT, where potentially all the ISP's customers could be sharing one IP address, through a gateway. The move is controversial as it could make some Internet services fail, but PlusNet says it is inevitable, and only a test at this stage." Regarding the failure of IPv6, these graphs imply otherwise.

Comments

I recall MxStream

[MathFox]

KPN tried "carrier grade" IP4-NAT in the Netherlands a decade ago... Unfortunately the router software was too buggy and made the routers trash and crash. And how can the customers of the ISP run servers on their computers? NAT has implications for the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.

Re:I recall MxStream

[idontgno]

NAT has implications for the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.

For a lot of organizations, that's a bonus. If you don't trust the outside network, you certainly don't want to peer arbitrarily with them, and certainly not at any outside machine's initiative. With NAT, an outside system can't initiate connectivity with any machine inside the NAT boundary without some kind of prior arrangement, so no open-ended network scanning.

If you treat the Internet as a big happy cloud of egalitarian peers collaborating at will, NAT sucks. If you treat the Internet as a bad neighborhood, which you have no way of avoiding between your house and the mall, NAT is the gated neighborhood you live in to keep the unsavory inhabitants of that bad neighborhood away from your pristine lawn and Lexus in the driveway. And people choose gated neighborhoods, and NAT, for that precise reason: separation and protection from the riff-raff, the panhandlers, the burglars and the car thieves, the Jehovah's Witnesses. Mostly the JWs, I think.

Re:I recall MxStream

[Miamicanes]

> That will be a problem of the ISP then

What a wonderfully-naive view of the internet. As we all know, consumers in Britain and America have bountiful high-speed low-latency broadband choices within a healthy, competitive marketplace. We have cable OR dsl... maybe cable AND dsl if we're incredibly lucky, and... er...um...

Ok, right then. We're fucked.

Cellular data has low caps and rapidly gets expensive if you're allowed to exceed them without getting throttled to sub-dialup speeds. Satellite data has insane latency, and *insidious* caps whose throttling kicks in at thresholds that aren't necessarily transparent or obvious from the marketing literature. Fiber to the home barely exists, and with the exception of Google in Kansas City, is still the exclusive fiefdom of basically one incumbent large corporation with its own agenda that's vehemently opposed to network neutrality. And those incumbent carriers have all done their best to bribe/buy/bully state officials into passing laws making it illegal for communities (or even existing neighborhoods) to take matters into their own hands, leapfrog over those incumbent carriers, and lay their own open-access fiber *anyway*.

IP Theft from IP...

[KitFox]

So what happens when the "copyright enforcement agencies" decide that somebody on that NAT IP has downloaded a movie and three strikes or something similar gets kicked in for the IP? (I know it's perfectly possible given port, IP, and Time to back-track a connection through a properly-logged NAT.Just an amusing side effect if somebody is dumb, and dumb happens a lot these days.)

Three birds with one stone

[tepples]

That's what firewalls are for, not NAT. Please stop confusing the two.

But they're not entirely orthogonal, as NAT imposes a firewall by default. It takes down three birds with one stone, namely delaying the effects of IPv4 depletion until an IPv6 rollout can be afforded, firewalling out those assumed to be unsavory, and upselling business class connections to home-based businesses. How would NAT be implemented without a firewall?

Re:Not "instead of", but "in addition to"

[bobbied]

You are right.

I never really understood why we didn't just map all the IPv4 addresses to a IPv6 subset and provide a very simple rule to translate, say by adding all zeros or some other number to the IPv4 address to get its IPv6 one. Then start forcing the adoption of IPv6 by not accepting v4 traffic from the top down though the domain registration authorities and hosting providers. Get legal agreements from them to not route IPv4 traffic in exchange for IPv6 address assignments and allowing new domain registrations, force top level domain authorities to only support IPv6 going forward.

You want to keep your website available? You want your customers to see new domains? You need a IPv6 assignment because we won't route v4 traffic and DNS is going to give you an IPv6 address. ISP's would then be free to provide IPv4 connections, but only if they did the translation to IPv6 internally themselves, which would end up costing IPv4 customers more money and limiting what they can see.

Eventually, there would be enough pressure for the ISP's to push IPv6 down the food chain to the end user who will either pay more for IPv4 service, or upgrade to IPv6. Eventually there will be a tipping point and IPv6 will see universal acceptance.

The problem here is that nobody really has the necessary power to force IPv6 on the world.... So we will keep bumping along trying more and more incremental patches to IPv4. Eventually, you could be behind 20 NATs wondering why your SIPP/VOIP device won't make any calls...

Hey, how about we just put all of the adult content on IPv6 only addresses.... You know THAT would set a fire under things....

Big Dumb Pipe

[ThatsNotPudding]

There should be a Kickstarter campaign to create an ISP that is actually named Big Dumb Pipe with promises not to up sell, or offer 'cloud storage', or offer security suites to protect your snowflakes, or pretend to be a content creator, but merely provide access and up time, for they are only a Big Dumb Pipe (tm). Oh; and no caps or throttling.