Harald,
My take (which is obviously biased) is that the number of NAT devices 2 years from now is likely to be significantly larger than the number of NAT devices currently deployed.
And - here I am making a real leap of faith - if the IETF recommendations for NAT devices make manufacturers who listen to them create NAT devices that make their customers more happy, then many of these new NAT devices may be conformant to IETF recommendations.
I think this ship has left port a long time ago and the likelihood that the IETF can now effect enough change to make it possible to write new applications that work consistently in the presence of NATs is very low. The installed base is much to large and NAT is showing up in devices being built by people who don't pay too much attention to the IETF. The same folks who do not build in IPv6, who break path MTU discovery, who strip out TCP options, etc. Now we expect them to build "good" NATs...
This is the IETF and if there is a constituency for working on this then I think it should happen. However, I hope no one will be surprised in 2-3 years that nothing much has changed.
Bob
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