UK ISPs Respond To the Dangers of Using Carrier Grade NAT Instead of IPv6 165
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.
If they offer IPv6...go ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
IPv6 core, IPv4 edge, thanks vendors (Score:4, Interesting)
the big providers in the US, and many of the rest, are IPv6 enabled in the core. but edge equipment at the subscriber is not up to the task, so NAT IPv4 is how it's done here. virtually all of the DSL modems are MD'd (manufacturer discontinued) IPv4, so it makes sense.
Re:If they offer IPv6...go ahead (Score:4, Informative)
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the only kind of tunnelling you want is the NAT64 set up on your router - you don't really want IPv4 in the external internet coming into your home network once you have IPv6, but you'll still have a fair few devices internally (eg your TV) that only speak IPv4.
If they exist on the router, the average guy shouldn't have any worries except to enable the "IPv4 legacy mode" switch.
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Firstly NAT64 isn't tunnelling, it is translation. Secondly NAT64 does NOT work for IPv4 initiated connections. As long as you have legacy IPv4 only devices that need to talk to the world you need a IPv4 path out bound. This could be dual stack, DS-Lite, 4rd.
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There are ISPs which offer IPv6 over DSL to all areas of the UK. So, at least in UK, IPv6 is available for anyone who can get DSL.
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There are ISPs which offer IPv6 over DSL to all areas of the UK. So, at least in UK, IPv6 is available for anyone who can get DSL.
The only ISPs I'm aware of that do this are the 3 mentioned (Entanet (who I use), A&A and Fluidata (who I've never heard of before)) - none of them are exactly mainstream ISPs, and their prices are far above what the mainstream ISPs charge. I guess you can say you get what you pay for, but until the mainstream ISPs start rolling out v6 it really isn't going to get much of a foothold.
There are several groups to consider:
- Hosting centres. They can see the writing on the wall and most have already rolle
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Which areas?
Virgin Media say they should have ipv6 running before they run out of addresses. Other ISPs offer ipv6 today and are available to anyone with broadband via a BT land line.
I'd have to imagine the percentage of UK homes that have internet access they would care about but who cannot get it via either BT or Virgin Media is very small.
I'd imagine the situation could be much worse in other countries like the US where homes often have a choice of just one or two providers.
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Virgin Media are missing the point. Some places in the world have already run out of IPv4 address and Virgin Media have customers that need to talk to those places. There is no good IPv4 to IPv6 solution.
Additionally delaying deploying IPv6 just forces their customers to delay testing of IPv6 with their systems. ISP are already years behind where they should be and this is just Virgin Media using spin merchants to deflect from the fact that they dropped the ball.
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Virgin Media say they should have ipv6 running before they run out of addresses.
Virgin Media don't seem to know what's going on, as far as I can tell. Last summer they said "by the end of 2012" - that clearly didn't happen. Now they just keep saying "we don't need IPv6, we've got plenty of IPv4 addresses" - completely missing the point that it doesn't matter how many spare IPv4 addresses they have if their customer needs to talk to someone who hasn't got any spare themselves.
Other ISPs offer ipv6 today and are available to anyone with broadband via a BT land line.
I'm not aware of any ADSL ISPs offering IPv6 other than the 3 mentioned in the article - 3 that are several ti
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Protocol speeds? (Score:2)
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Precisely! ISPs can either hand out /128s or /64s or greater. They'd have to hand out /126 to hand out just 4 addresses, but most routers wouldn't recognize such a partition.
Besides, I fail to see why IPv6 should me any more expensive. If anything, assuming the most gouging, they could offer IPv6 @ current IPv4 prices, and hike prices on existing IPv4 connections, thereby forcing customers to make a choice to switch. As it is, as far as supply & demand laws go, IPv4 is what is in short supply (and
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Pink Floyd. (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't know Pink Floyd was talking about ISPs.
"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way. The pool is gone, v4 is over. Thought I'd more addresses to assign."
Re:Remember this is the UK... (Score:5, Informative)
Judging from what I've read about US telcos and ISPs, and the plans I've seen for mobile and broadband access here, it sounds like you have that the wrong way round. We have way more competition and better pricing in the UK.
Re:Remember this is the UK... (Score:4, Insightful)
You have the European Union and its competition rules to thank for that.
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We've had those rules for longer than the EU has existed, our state-owned monopoly on the tubes was privatised in 1985...
Re:Remember this is the UK... (Score:4, Informative)
As you Brits say, bollocks.
Here's just one example:
In 2008, the European Commission announced that costs for sending roaming texts were also too high and, if the mobile industry didn't voluntarily drop prices, further mobile roaming regulations could follow.
Mobile service providers ignored this warning, so the Commission has now regulated mobile roaming text prices, too. From 1 July 2009, all mobile service providers were forced to drop their text prices to 11p per text sent. Receiving texts while abroad is free.
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Yep, gotta agree with parent - £22/month for 78Mb/s (measured) from BT and fully ready for IPv6. I got sick of Be Un Limited after the third time they sent me a questionnaire on fibre.
Me: I'd love fibre. FTTC or FTTP, whatever! When are you planning to roll it out?
Be: Mwahaha! I can't believe you fell for that. But we'll keep stringing you along so you keep paying us our subs...
Looking forward to hearing of Be's demise. There's very little I despise more in IT than a company that's all mouth and no
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Fully ready for IPv6? Who's your ISP? BT have been very cagey and most FTTP providers are only reselling Openreach's wholesale product.
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Off the top of my head:
AAISP..
Entanet..
They resell BT wholesale, which just provides a PPP tunnel to servers run by the ISP, what protocol(s) they choose to run over the top of that tunnel has nothing to do with BT.
Interestingly, many years ago BT had a public ipv6 tunnel broker service, but this appears to be long gone. No idea why they abandoned it, but BT were a relatively early adopter of V6 and already had experience of v6 before 21cn or fttc were being rolled out, even first generation adsl was still
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The copper PSTN network that means everyone has a telephone exchange near them was originally built by the Post Office (ie by the government). The telephone service half of the Post Office was then privatised as BT (the postal part became Royal Mail).
Regulations to avoid BT becoming a monopoly mean that BT has to offer other companies the ability to provide their own DSL services hosted on BT's DSLAMs (BT Wholesale). LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) then meant that BT had to allow the companies access to the exc
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1) This is a future planning issue, not a service quality issue, and therefore there is nothing for end users to notice yet
2) Complaining is the Great British passtime and I'm affronted that you would dare question our continued dominance in the field
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I guess you've never purchased broadband in both countries.
Broadband in the US is expensive, slow and non-competitive by comparison. Customer service is astonishingly poor if you compare to a decent UK provider like Zen or A&A.
Most US homes will have a choice of one or two providers. DSL from the phone company and cable.
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Most US homes will have a choice of one or two providers. DSL from the phone company and cable.
While the cable scene is as you describe DSL is open to competition by independent ISPs. Telco provides last mile circuit and ISP provides Internet connectivity thru telco ATM cloud.
It may not be advertised as heavily or known to most people as an option but it is there in many areas.
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It's certainly not where I am in Virginia, nor in any location I have lived or my immediate family live. The FCC ruled almost eight years ago that local providers no longer have to share their lines with third parties, unlike in the UK where BT are required to make available the last mile connection.
As a result, my family in the UK, even those who live in tiny villages, have access to a multitude of ISPs. Here, in a decent sized US city, I have a choice of two providers.
From my personal experience, I don't
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Indeed, and I think now that pretty much everyone who wants broadband has it, the competition has focused on retaining customers.
After moving house and selecting an ISP I checked with my flatmate that it was OK. He said it wasn't -- his online gaming would use 10x as much bandwidth as they would allow. (I don't play games, so I was amazed how much bandwidth Steam used when he told me -- 10GB+ for a game, and regular multi-GB updates.)
I phoned to cancel the order. They upgraded me to the top package (100G
Major Supplier does not want home based servers (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been following the IP6 thing here in the UK with interest. BT the major supplier seem to be uninterested in full IPV6 for all customers. I've seen statements that they are pursuing CGNAT for IPV6. If this is true it beggars belief. The only reason I can that makes any form of sense is the attempt to stop a proliferation of home based servers, suck as toasters, fridges, TV & PVRs etc.
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But IPv6 is more or less designed to assign an IP address to every goddamn thing in your house, right down to the nails in the walls, so it really doesn't make any sense to stop people from doing that either.
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ISPs are not the ones who designed ipv6 or the concepts behind it.
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.
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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 firewal
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There is a pretty hard core attitude shift in ipv6 that thou shalt not static assign addresses. Dynamic / multicast DNS to the rescue, etc.
Also a VERY hard core attitude shift away from 1:1 mapping of address to interface. I have an ethernet at home with something like 4 ipv6 addrs on it, long story.
If you do that, a renumbering is simple. Wait a moment for the router to start advertising its new prefix and you're all done. No need to reboot or any of that.
We can trust mfgrs and poor programmers to tota
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> There is a pretty hard core attitude shift in ipv6 that thou shalt not
> static assign addresses. Dynamic / multicast DNS to the rescue, etc.
Idiot internet hippies... sigh. The way around that is to assign fixed IPV6 link-local addresses in your hosts file. See https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/428331-ipv6-crash-course-for-linux [linux.com]
> Let's say you have three PCs in your little link-local LAN:
> fatfreddy, phineas, and franklin. You can use these fine
> hostnames over IPv6 as easy as pie. You'l
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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
UPNP works well with any good IPv6 firewall. Just like UPNP with IPv4+NAT.
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That seems a bit pointless. Why have a firewall if you're going to let anything open it up? Just as effective would be to have no firewall and simply don't open ports on the end machines if you don't want to accept connections.
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Common use case: User wants to run a SMB server on his home network without it being accessible from the Internet.
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Amazing how you manage to spin two giant downsides of NAT as advantages. #1 is especially bad: no end-to-end connectivity means whole classes of applications (like peer-to-peer systems) are only possible with awful hacks (if you are lucky). #2 is really a non-issue. Things like SLAAC and DNS were invented for a reason.
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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.
They don't know what kind of NAT though, which matters for most applications that care about end-to-end connectivity because there's a good chance the system on the other end is NATted too. Is it full-cone, restricted-cone, symmetric? Does this depend on whether the application is speaking UDP or TCP? What about the other end? Will we have to let the other system initiate the connection because they're behind a symmetric NAT and can't holepunch, or vice-versa, or will we have to give up on peer-to-peer comm
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That's only fine if you don't want any internet connectivity with those devices at all. If a NAT'ed connection would genuinely be good enough for a some proper subset of your network, then why use up globally visible IP's that could be better used on devices that actually *would* use them?
Sure, this might not seem like a problem given the large address space available with ipv6, but can you give me a single practical reason that we should be deliberately wasteful with that space when NAT accomplishes
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Not necessarily. If you want a cluster on its own little network, it acts as one machine, so logically to everyone else it should come across as one logical host when routed out. Regardless of IPv6 or not
If you want a cluster act as one machine then you'll have to load balance it anyway. Either by appliance or software, so what's the deal?
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IP4 is all you need, if .. (Score:3, Interesting)
.. your country bought a shit load of IP address in the early day of teh Internet.
for the record:
Slovenia population: 2M
IP4 reserved IP: 2.5M
http://www.nirsoft.net/countryip/si.html [nirsoft.net]
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The college I went to has a full v4 class B address space to play with, about 65000. There are about 3000 students enrolled at any given time and fewer than a thousand employees.
I was hosting several servers in my dorm room with Internet addressable IPs (sadly not static)
Re:IP4 is all you need, if .. (Score:4, Interesting)
In the early day of the internet we didn't even bother with DHCP, all the PCs in the lab had static internet IPs.
Linux and windows 95 with static internet IP4 address with no firewalls.
Pull something like that now and you are fucked up in 2 minutes. :)
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I should mention that this was still the case when I graduated from there in 2010
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That just halves the typical usability time frame for your average Windows 95 installation.
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your company is idiotic. you shouldn't get a PUBLIC ip when you connect to a VPN with ipv4
CGN is not instead of IPv6, it is complementary. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if an ISP implements IPv6 or dual stack for his residential customers, they will still face problems:
- IPv6-only customer will not be able to reach IPv4-only content (and I bet there will be lots of it for years)) without CGN (NAT64)
- not enough public IPv4 addresses for all customers mean that there has to be a form of NAT deployed centrally (CGN with NAT44) to provide them with IPv4 access (again, not all content is reachable by IPv6).
Of course public IPv4 addresses (going around CGN) will be still there, you will just need to pay more for them. Marketing departments are not going to miss such an occasion, after all they need a financial explanation to rollout of IPv6.
If you want to host a game server or FTP, you still can. Just pay a tad more for the privilege, right?
IPv6 by itself is not going to resolve everything and avoid CGN usage. Those ISPs who say "we deployed IPv6 and it fixes everything" forget about the problem underneath (trailing/legacy IPv4 content).
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NAT64 is not the solution so many here make it out to be. The original sensible migration path was to use dual stack and get most services over to ipv6 before the v4 space ran out.
Everyone here knows the problems with less than 1:1 NAT in a pure v4 world. Slashdot'ers complain bitterly about it all the time. NAT64 brings all those problems and more.
Think about this. Suppose your v6 only mail relay needs to send mail to a v4 only relay. It looks up the MX for the domain, than looks up the name it gets i
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As you wrote - each of ISPs mentioned in the article says in one way or the other that CGN is a neccessity.
Problem with IPv6 is that the business case is weak. ISPs have to spend money upgrading to IPv6 without offering anything new to get more income from subscribers. CGN and "pay more for a public IPv4" is, sadly, one of such cases that is likely to go forward.
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What's new that they could actually afford to offer more public IP's for home subscribers that actually want them.
And increased customer choice spells more opportunity for commercial gain, does it not?
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As you wrote - each of ISPs mentioned in the article says in one way or the other that CGN is a neccessity.
Most also say they have no immediate plans to deploy CGN as sufficient IPv4 address space is available within their allocations.
Every last one of them have already or are in process of deploying IPv6.
Problem with IPv6 is that the business case is weak.
Q. Hello, I am Interested in Internet service, do you offer IPv6?
A. No, there is no business case for us to do so.
Q. Thanks for your time....click.
For me this is already reality today. Every RFP without exception we have participated in last 3 years either required or asked about IPv6.
ISPs have to spend money upgrading to IPv6 without offering anything new to get more income from subscribers.
CGN and "pay more for a public IPv4" is, sadly, one of such cases that is likely to go forward
This was never about pro
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Frankly, your ISP doesn't care that much about you, because you're not the vast majority of their user base. People who have even *heard* the terms "IPv4" and IPv6" are probably less than 1% of their customers.
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Frankly, your ISP doesn't care that much about you, because you're not the vast majority of their user base. People who have even *heard* the terms "IPv4" and IPv6" are probably less than 1% of their customers.
I think it depends on who you are. If you are just a residential customer getting service from megaco regardless of what your gripe is the sentiment is fairly universal.
Small ISPs on the other hand care about every customer especially if you happen to have a business account. It only takes a few such calls to light necessary fires.
The larger ones.. the ones who can afford to not care about their customers are paradoxically the ones currently much further along deploying IPv6.
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How many people call and ask for IPv6?
That 0.01% who are technical and who care?
For majority of subscribers it's rather:
Q: Hello, do I need this IPv6?
A: No, it gives you same things as IPv4.
Q: Oh, thank you, I'll take just plain old IPv4 then, don't want to pay more for the same.
As for RFPs... sadly people ask for many things when they provide requirements, but do not quite use them. The very same companies that require or ask about IPv6 support when buying network equipment often just don't do anything wit
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The problem with ipv6/ipv4 dual stacking when there is little to no ipv6 only out there is that it is pain now, payoff later...maybe. Unsurprisingly, it's had trouble getting people to line up for it.
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True, although those mechanisms are fairly new (=a bit late) and not widely commercially implemented at the moment (home-device support), compared to centralized "classic" NAT in form of a CGN device.
I can predict the future (Score:3)
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Guess which ones customers are going to go for.
The only one available in their area. If customers have a choice of two (or three!) ISPs, they will all use carrier-grade NAT.
IPv6 alleviates scarcity, and thus profits made on that scarcity. This is why it will not be implemented without government intervention.
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I have a couple of questions:
Are Internet-users in the UK actually limited to one ISP per area?
How do ISPs profit from scarcity of addresses? I assume that you're referring to the practice of reserving static IP addresses for a premium, but they already did that pre-scarcity. Now that addresses are exhausted wouldn't it simply mean that they have fewer IPs available to sell to new customers, while existing customers who already lease static IPs will cling to the ones they already have?
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Are Internet-users in the UK actually limited to one ISP per area?
I'm not sure, but if the UK is anything like the US, I wouldn't be surprised if customers had no choice in the end.
How do ISPs profit from scarcity of addresses? I assume that you're referring to the practice of reserving static IP addresses for a premium, but they already did that pre-scarcity.
You answered your own question. Carrier-grade NAT would allow ISPs to charge a premium for a residential IP (and an even bigger premium for a static IP).
Now that addresses are exhausted wouldn't it simply mean that they have fewer IPs available to sell to new customers, while existing customers who already lease static IPs will cling to the ones they already have?
The whole point of IPv6 is to do away with the scarcity of end-to-end static IPs. From a business perspective, IPv6 would destroy the investment these existing customers have made.
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Actually the UK is very lucky in this regard. I use the word lucky as I seriously doubt it was ever planned this way - that would be too much to expect.
We are generally fortunate in having multiple ISPs all across the country. Apart from the 'big boys' (BT, Virgin, Sky, Talk Talk) there are a number of smaller ones - both indepe
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Care to mention which supplier this is you use?
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Are Internet-users in the UK actually limited to one ISP per area?
Most people end up using BT Wholesale's ADSL for the last mile, which is treated as a utility and regulated as such. Other ISPs use that but have their own arrangements for peering. Presumably they need to co-operate with BT to get IPV6 working, so they are doomed.
In urban areas, ISPs sometimes locate equipment in BTs exchanges and run their own backhaul network; presumably they are a little less dependent on BT. And there are ISPs like Virgin which bought up the cable networks after the dot-com buble burst
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Most people end up using BT Wholesale's ADSL for the last mile, which is treated as a utility and regulated as such. Other ISPs use that but have their own arrangements for peering. Presumably they need to co-operate with BT to get IPV6 working, so they are doomed.
No. The ISP connects to BT Wholesale using PPTP and customers establish a PPP link to the ISP, so ISPs can (as mine does) send both IPv4 and IPv6 over the PPP link. It does, of course, require the customer's router to support IPv6.
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No. The ISP connects to BT Wholesale using PPTP
Correction, I should have written L2TP not PPTP.
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BT supply the local loop to everywhere in the country except Hull, which is supplied by Kingston. Cable providers, and by far the largest of them is Virgin, supply an alternative local loop to around 2/3 of the population.
On the BT network, other providers have put equipment into most of the exchanges which you can connect to over ADSL instead of BT (called local loop unbundling). BT also resell their service to other ISPs and you can get them everywhere you can get BT. If you want to use Cable, BT Fibre
define:Carrier Grade (Score:4, Funny)
WTF!? He just one-hit killed me. That's some Carrier Grade bullshit right there.
At DeweyCheatam&Howe, we are committed to combining Carrier Grade customer service with Wall Street Grade executive profits.
Come on, dude, stop driving that Carrier Grade '60s clunker and get a real car!
She's my ex-girlfriend now, because that Carrier Grade whore was in our bedroom with some poolboy from down the block.
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"Carrier grade" has nothing to do with quality.
It has to do with policy.
If you were searching for synonyms, in the context of "carrier grade NAT" you wouldn't be too far off with "large scale", "group", or "widely distributed".
NAT has problems at any level. On a small scale, such as home use, these may not insurmountable. At carrier grade level, however, it's very problematic.
Compare being hit by a bicycle to being hit by a bus. Neither is good, but the latter is more likely to cause lasting pr
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"Carrier grade" has nothing to do with quality.
Well for NAT, it has a lot to do with quality, just not in any positive sense. :)
If you were searching for synonyms, in the context of "carrier grade NAT" you wouldn't be too far off with "large scale", "group", or "widely distributed".
In fact, many people in the IETF prefer the name LSN (Large Scale NAT) to CGN. Or CHN (Carrier Hosted NAT). "Carrier Grade" carrys an implied endorsement. "Carrier Grade Routers", "Carrier Grade NAT". Oooh, shiny, it must be good.
Already happened (Score:5, Informative)
CGN has already happened in countries that were late on the Internet bandwagon and got too few IPs.
I am currently an unfortunate subscriber going through CGN, and let me tell you, the time I spent debugging connectivity issues is mindblowing.
For those who don't understand the extent of the problem, CGN is also called NAT444:
Your internal network has an IPv4 subnet, say 10.17.0.x. Then your router is allocated an IPv4 from your ISP. You think that's your IP, but it isn't. Your ISP itself is running NAT internally, and ultimately your data is being sent through the wire to the wider Internet with yet another IP.
So you have 3 networks: IPv4 IPv4 IPv4
Practically speaking, nothing that acts as a server will work. i.e. none of the modern multiplayer networking stacks work reliably, for example. When testing your PS3 networking, it will say (correctly) that you are screwed because you have a "Type 3 NAT", which is Sony speak for NAT444.
Expand TCP port numbers (Score:2, Offtopic)
In jest I once remarked that we should keep IPv4 but rejig TCP to support 128 bits of port numbering (or maybe even more). Each client could have a (formerly) full 16bit range of ports and we could support a bajillion devices and do modulo 2^16 math to 'map' to the ports you're familiar with.
People called me evil.
May I repeat that this was in jest.
Article is all FUD (Score:3)
This article was totally lacking in any useful facts about why CGN (Carrier Grade NAT) won't work just fine. As you can see today, lots of games and things like Skype manage just fine to talk to other devices that are also behind a NAT. One of the many ways they do it is ICE (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5245). Most applications today are designed to work behind NATs, that is because most people are behind NATs. Sure, I wish I could wave a magic want and have everyone using v6 but articles like this that have no factual information on what the problem is or why don't help.
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CGN means you're double masquerade NAT'd. Your router get's 1 private IP, and NAT's that to your internal address range. Your router is also NAT'd behind another router, which has your real, globally routable IP - which you're sharing with a bunch of other customers. If you wish to experience what this is like, setup a 2nd router in front of your current one, and pretend you're not allowed to change anything on the one that has the real IP.
So opening outbound connections is OK; both routers keep track of th
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>And besides, how would the router decide who gets the 80 or 22 port out of the potentially thousands of customers all sharing one fixed IP? Same goes for upnp port requests.
ISPs don't have to (and probably can't) cram their entire customer base on to one IP. It's quite possible they'll have 16 or 64 or 256 external "real" IP addresses for thousands of customers.
There will still be contention, but not as much.
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As you can see today, lots of games
Games use a client server model not a peer to peer model. A game server listens on a port for incoming requests from a client. All client to client interactions are server mediated.
things like Skype
If you count having to operate an army of supernode servers and routing calls thru strangers machines just because some sizable portion of users lack the necessary connectivity to establish an end-end session then yes Skype just "works".
This article was totally lacking in any useful facts about why CGN (Carrier Grade NAT) won't work just fine.
From quotes mentioning lots and lots of testing it sounds to me they are afraid of breakage
Since 95 .. still nowhere (Score:2)
1995-ish I wanted to write my thesis on IPv6. I did a lot of research, tests, then decided on a different subject that was closer to my heart at the time. (had to skip a year because of work abroad)...
2013: I am still on IPv4 and there is not even a hint that my ISP's employees even heard of it.
I honestly don't get it. OS-es support it, devices support it, network devices support it, it is just not happening. The fastest evolving technology, the billion-chillion dollar web, and we are still sharing IPs and
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Well - the main question that comes to my mind is: how are you going to migrate users from iv4 to ipv6?
And I am not talking about geeks on /. and other network experts.
I am talking about regular users who have four or five devices at home that connect to a dsl router at home either with Ethernet cable and/or Wifi. All using ipv4.
How are you going to migrate all those users to ipv6?
Is somebody from the isp going to visit every customer and migrate them to ipv6? As in - the technician from the isp is going to
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Well - the main question that comes to my mind is: how are you going to migrate users from iv4 to ipv6?
Well you don't migrate them *from* IPv4 - you keep IPv4 running, you just add IPv6 too.
- Start by dual-stacking the ISP. At this point, everything works as it always did, all but the geeks are still limited to IPv4.
- Start supplying dual-stacked routers to your new customers. Your old customers will carry on as before, your new customers will be using both protocols, but favour IPv6 where possible. Devices like the Windows 7 laptop, or Android tablet will Just Work with the IPv6 router, no configuration
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even in western australia (Score:2)
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It'd probably be enough for a large portion of our galaxy, too.
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Not sure if you're trying to be funny, sarcastic, or if you genuinely think that.
The reason we got stuck with 32 bits is because when that was decided upon, nobody ever expected that the internet protocol was going to become ubiquitous. That shortsighted view does not exist today.
Yes, we will run out of ipv6 space eventually... it's a given. But it's not going to happen before we go to the stars [wordpress.com].
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Perhaps, but it's impossible [wikipedia.org], which rather puts a damper on doing it.
This is what we already did with IPv6.
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