UK ISP PlusNet Testing Carrier-Grade NAT Instead of IPv6 445
judgecorp writes "Faced with the shortage of IPv4 addresses and the failure of IPv6 to take off, British ISP PlusNet is testing carrier-grade network address translation CG-NAT, where potentially all the ISP's customers could be sharing one IP address, through a gateway. The move is controversial as it could make some Internet services fail, but PlusNet says it is inevitable, and only a test at this stage."
Regarding the failure of IPv6, these graphs imply otherwise.
This is just the beginning (Score:5, Informative)
My Rant.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Am I reading that graph wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
Google reports about 1% of their traffic is IPv6. That's probably a better estimate of IPv6 deployment.
Re:I recall MxStream (Score:4, Informative)
NAT has implications for the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.
For a lot of organizations, that's a bonus. If you don't trust the outside network, you certainly don't want to peer arbitrarily with them, and certainly not at any outside machine's initiative. With NAT, an outside system can't initiate connectivity with any machine inside the NAT boundary without some kind of prior arrangement, so no open-ended network scanning.
That's what firewalls are for, not NAT. Please stop confusing the two.
Re:Really instead of ? (Score:4, Informative)
ISPs are the problem here.
Actually Windows 7 is also part of the problem and a step backwards. You see it has a buggy Teredo implementation leading to a ton of Teredo Ethernet adapters hanging on to their entries in the ipconfig tables. Some people report up to thousands of adapters. This has lead to various organizations disabling the IPv6 stack in their Windows network configuration.
Re:My Rant.... (Score:5, Informative)
Forget IPV6 ... it doesn't have valid HTML [w3.org], valid CSS [w3.org] and looks terrible on mobile devices [fourteenminutes.com].
Re:I recall MxStream (Score:4, Informative)
With NAT, an outside system can't initiate connectivity with any machine inside the NAT boundary without some kind of prior arrangement
That's untrue. Most consumer NAT routers (at least the ones I tested about 3 years ago - doubt its really changed) don't bother to include a stateful firewall and with appropriate ISP-side routing, will happilly let connections into the private network. What you need is a stateful firewall, not NAT - that will protect you, and also doesn't completely fuck up loads of protocols at the same time.
The depressing thing (other than idiots claiming that NAT is good for security) is that Plusnet *were* trialling IPv6, but pulled the plug on the trial last year. When I asked them a month or so ago, they informed me that they had no plans to roll out IPv6 at all. Time to switch to a competent ISP if you're with Plusnet, I suspect (EntaNet and AAISP both offer v6 connections over DSL).
Re:Not "instead of", but "in addition to" (Score:5, Informative)
I never really understood why we didn't just map all the IPv4 addresses to a IPv6 subset and provide a very simple rule to translate, say by adding all zeros or some other number to the IPv4 address to get its IPv6 one.
Um....they did?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses [wikipedia.org]