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.

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:Priority Failure.

[AmiMoJo]

Virgin, or NTL as it was back then, thought that too once. They introduced a transparent web cache and it broke a huge number of sites. It was impossible to download files from popular websites because it looked like the same IP address was trying to download 50,000 at once. Video streaming sites instantly banned the proxies after seeing a massive DOS attack from them. Any site that needed you to log in was likely to block all NTL customers due to multiple failed login attempts from the proxy's IP addresses.

People did notice and did complain, and after a while they dropped them.

Re:Priority Failure.

[Sarten-X]

diamonds is not a product, it's a mineral (aka raw material, commodity)

Diamond is indeed a mineral, with many industrial uses. Most of the diamonds mined, though, aren't used or marketed as an exclusive product. More on this in a minute.

and what is the difference between "rare" and "uncommon"?

Something "rare" is hard to find, even if you have the resources to acquire it. Something "uncommon" is just something that's not commonplace. It might also be rare, but in this case (as with Apple products) the price is kept just high enough that not everybody that wants one will have the resources to get one. They're readily available, but for some reason, it's still remarkable to see one.

To use the venerable car analogy, a DeLorean is rare, because there's so few of them in existence. A brand-new Mercedes Benz is uncommon, because it's unlikely for the average person to buy one.

...it is a status symbol because De Beers adverised it... as a brand!...

Less of a brand (because diamonds don't carry a big label saying "De Beers"), but more of a specific product. The symbolism of a diamond standing for love and commitment is purely a De Beers invention. Want to impress your wife? Give her a new Mercedes. Love her forever? Give her a diamond!

A car is just a chunk of metal, and a diamond is just a rock. A chunk of metal with the promise of reliable transportation and the luxury of comfort is a product. A rock with the symbolism of love and promise of durability is also a product.

Have you ever seen anybody advertising a commodity before? "Gold is Forever", anybody?

Every. Goddamned. Day.

I work in finance, so I watch a lot of finance-oriented television. Yes, there are many companies touting their gold-related investment strategies, which basically boil down to "buy gold and make the price go up so my pre-existing gold holdings are worth more". In a way, it's similar: They're shifting the public perception of a mundane item into a valuable product.

Excepts this product is needed practically everywhere in technology, if not for De Beers having a chock-hold on the market and inflating prices.

There are many other manufacturers of synthetic diamonds, perfect for industrial use. Until recently, though, the diamonds they could easily produce were all colored, which aren't as suitable for jewelry. Now Gemesis, Scio, and others can produce gem-quality colorless diamonds.

These guys produces a flawless artificial diamond for use in technology, and got death threats over it.

[citation needed]

If the price went down it could revolutionize semiconductors industry.

The price is currently a few dollars per carat, in powder form. One carat is a huge amount compared to the size of existing transistors, so it's rather ridiculous to blame the price for the lack of diamond semiconductors. Instead, it's likely the immaturity of diamond semiconductor technology that holds up back:

The combinations of the extreme properties of diamond ... suggest that diamond should out-perform nearly every other semiconducting material system for electronic applications. IN PRINCIPLE! The reality is that there are many other factors involved in developing and implementing a technology: cost, manufacturing infrastructure, investment, and knowledge base. I think it is fair to say that diamond materials need a lot more research, knowledge, and technology development before they can be considered a mature semiconducting material.

...that technology is going to be squashed by De Beers, much like the electric ca

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!

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.

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.

Re:Just use IPV6

[Khyber]

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

Re:"Not widely inplemented"

[xorsyst]

BT already gives all customers a home hub (router) as part of the deal, this is pretty standard in the uk. They upgrade them every couple of years for you, so going to an IPv6-enabled one is not difficult.

I've had to deal with this.

[Gerafin]

Having to share an IP address with tons of people is absolutely, 100% a crippling experience. There are plenty of sites (newspapers, the site I get textures from, RapidShare, etc.) who limit their services by IP address. There's nothing quite like seeing messages about how your IP has exceeded the download limit on a website you've never visited before. Also: having to deal with bans when playing online games, as many are IP-based. The impossibility of hosting your own servers for games or other purposes. BitTorrent is nigh unusable. I would not pay a dime for this kind of a service, ever again.

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

CGNAT has nothing to do with End-to-end

[bgt421]

The end-to-end principle has to do with where network logic is placed, not which devices are reachable, routeable, or have an IP address. As simply as possible, the end-to-end principle means that we should have smart end hosts and a dumb network. This is why routers don't guarantee packet delivery -- its up to the hosts (with TCP, et al.) to ensure this. This is in contrast to telephony networks, where the network is responsible for almost everything.

There are good reasons to oppose CGNAT, but the "end to end principle" is not one of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
or, if you're inclined to primary sources:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/End-to-End%20Arguments%20in%20System%20Design.pdf

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.