UK ISPs Respond To the Dangers of Using Carrier Grade NAT Instead of IPv6

Mark.JUK writes "Several major Internet Service Providers in the United Kingdom, including BSkyB, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, AAISP and Fluidata, have warned that the adoption of Carrier Grade NAT (IPv4 address sharing) is likely to become increasingly common in the future. But the technology, which many view as a delaying tactic until IPv6 becomes more common place, is not without its problems and could cause a number of popular services to fail (e.g. XBox Live, PlayStation Network, FTP hosting etc.). The prospect of a new style of two tier internet could be just around the corner." A few of the ISPs gave the usual marketing department answers, but three of them noted that they've been offering IPv6 for ages and CGNAT is only inevitable for folks that didn't prepare for what they knew was coming. Which, unfortunately, appears to be most of the major UK ISPs.

Comments

Re:Major Supplier does not want home based servers

[feld]

Usually when you see a "demand" for NAT on ipv6 its people who don't understand the relationship between a statefull firewall and NAT, and they really are "demanding" their existing firewall minus the NAT part.

2 advantages of NAT beyond firewalling:

1) Apps know there's NAT, and cannot assume end-to-end connectivity. With IPv6, determining if there's end to end connectivity is much hardware because firewalls are transparent - you may be able to establish a partial link, but not a full one because the firewall lets some of the packets through.

Please tell me you don't have a job working with networks. Either programming or as a sysadmin/engineer. This problem was solved by people communicating across the internet before you were born.

There's only one advantage of NAT: reserving the IPv4 space. There are no others.