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

On the other hand....

[mark-t]

With CGN, they can't *POSSIBLY* argue that an IP address somehow is linked with a particular subscriber anymore.

This is going to create a hell of a problem when people inside the CGN start doing stuff they aren't supposed to outside of it, and those people outside can't do anything useful with the IP that they have.

Need some explanation here...

[Pollux]

Over the last eight years and my previous three ISPs, my router has never once received anything other than a 192.168.x.x or a 10.x.x.x IP address from my local ISP. Not once have I received a live & legit IPv4 address. I have to pay a lot more for those. What's the difference between this and CGNAT?

Verizon isn't much better

[zerofoo]

Verizon started field testing IPv6 on their FIOS network in 2010. I figured it's 2013 - they should be done testing by now.

I called our business services rep about a month ago and asked about IPv6 service for our FIOS connections at our offices.

The rep's response:

"IPv6, what's that?" "Hold on. Let me ask my support engineer."

Support engineer's response:

"IPv6 - What's that?"

I may retire from the IT business before Verizon deploys IPv6.

-ted

Re:Priority Failure.

[Bengie]

They shouldn't be able to call it "Internet" access if it's not a public IP address. This means they should not be classified as an ISP because they would not be offering Internet access as their primary service, just a crippled gateway to the Internet.

Re:Priority Failure.

[compro01]

I was told in grad school that we were going to run out of IP4 addresses in 2 years. That was in 1993.

Yeah, then we came up with CIDR. Then we widely implemented NAT as a stopgap.

The wolf has actually been there. We've just been shooting at it and scaring it off. Now it's back again and we're out of ammo.

Re:If people had put more thought into the transit

[petermgreen]

Actually I think all we really needed was a transition mechanism that went with the flow of NAT e.g.

1: for each IPv4 address and UDP port combination an IPv6 address would be allocated.
2: IPv6 packets passing over legacy infrastructure would be encapsulated in a UDP packet. An anycast address would be created to represent IPv6 addresses with no IPv4 equivilent.
3: if a NAT changed the IPv4 address or UDP port of a packet containing an encapsulated IPv6 packet then the IPv6 addresses of the packet inside would be updated to match

With this system the end systems and internet core would need to be updated, but the rest of the existing infrastructure could be left in place.

But i'm just a nobody. Those with power over the stamdards process were on a crusade against NAT so such a system would be unthinkable to them and the transition mechanisms we got either ignored NAT (6to4) or fought it (teredo). Worse still ISPs didn't take either of those transition mechanisms seriously meaning that connectivity between users of transition mechanisms and users of native IPv6 has been poor.