BT Begins Customer Tests of Carrier Grade NAT

judgecorp writes "BT Retail has started testing Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) with its customer. CGNAT is a controversial practice, in which IP addresses are shared between customers, limiting what customers can do on the open Internet. Although CGNAT goes against the Internet's original end-to-end principles, ISPs say they are forced to use it because IPv4 addresses are running out, and IPv6 is not widely implemented. BT's subsidiary PlusNet has already carried out CGNAT trials, and now BT is trying it on "Option 1" customers who pay for low Internet usage."

Comments

Priority Failure.

[Anonymous Coward]

If people had spent as much money on IP6 as they have on NAT, we'd be done by now.

Re:Priority Failure.

[Noughmad]

that doesn't mean artificially scarce resources, which aren't truly scarce.

That's why those De Beers guys are so poor.

Re:Priority Failure.

[Anonymous Coward]

99.999 percent of people will never notice or care. They could make a free opt-out to satisfy the geeks and few would ever even ask for it.

Re:Priority Failure.

[Overzeetop]

No, this time never existed. Back when everyone who had an internet connection cared about their connectivity there was no NAT - or at least none at the provider level. It's only when consumers hit the internet that we got NAT on a wide scale, and all those people only consumed data for the most part. People who were early adopters and were used to being hands on, a small fraction of the growing tide, cared then and care now. As time marches on, that fraction gets smaller and smaller.

Re:Priority Failure.

[Sarten-X]

De Beers creates artificial exclusivity, not scarcity. It's a subtle but important distinction.

They produce a product that people value not because it's particularly rare, but because it's just uncommon enough to be a status symbol. Various substitutes can look and act similarly, so the high prices aren't justified by an actual need for the product. Rather, the need is for the brand itself, and the company creates and perpetuates the value of that brand by limiting supply. They ensure there's just enough supply to meet demand, but not enough surplus to impact the prices people are willing to pay.

Steve Jobs understood this concept well.

Re:Priority Failure.

[andreyv]

99.999 percent of people will never notice or care.

...until one of them gets IP banned on a popular website/game, and brings down all others.

Ah, the bad old days...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Fantastic! This will be just as wonderful as AOL was, back when they were still unsure about this whole 'ISP' fad, and offered ghastly semi-access to the internet proper. I think I just threw up in my mouth from all the nostalgia!

Re:Just use IPV6

[Khyber]

It's BT. No explanation for the sheer incompetence is required.

Re:On the other hand....

[mark-t]

Nope.... not remotely. Which is the whole problem.

Because if BT implements CGN, then the IP that somebody outside ot BT would have for somebody inside of it would actually map to a whole bunch of BT subscribers. BT has no possible way to tell which subscriber utilized the IP because all of them did... possibly even all at exactly the same time, unless BT maps every subscriber to a unique global IP anyways, at which point BT doesn't gain anything by using CGN at all.