UK ISPs Respond To the Dangers of Using Carrier Grade NAT Instead of IPv6

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

[ERJ]

If, and only if, they do offer IPv6 services to their customers than I am pretty cool with this. Realistically IPv4 is done. There is no real other option for the ISPs than to move to this type of setup for backwards compatibility and push IPv6 for full compatibility.

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CGN is not instead of IPv6, it is complementary.

[Moskit]

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).

Re:Remember this is the UK...

[Alomex]

You have the European Union and its competition rules to thank for that.