At 11:33 AM 11/22/2004, Fred Baker wrote:
At 09:44 AM 11/22/04 -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:Who needs market research? All you have to do is look at the cost-feature profile of the most popular NATs and notice who they were designed for. Those vendors have already done the market research and bet real money on the results.
Has anyone mentioned that ISP's charge a absurd premium for multiple static V4 IP numbers in residential markets saying ..oh thats a "business" service.
NAT's exist because IP numbers are made artificially expensive by ISP's.
Yes, but be careful with that. What has happened at Linksys and others is that they have come up with a simple configuration that allows them to sell a pre-configured device to a client, advertise a few features that clients like, and sell them like hotcakes with little or no support costs. What the customer is buying is not, in most cases, "uses private addressing to separate your IP address space from that of your ISP so that if you move you will not have to reconfigure things." That may be what Linksys etc is selling, but what the customer is buying is "plug it in and it will work." Any configuration that gives the customer simplicity of implementation by a non-expert in the technology will meet their needs.
To sum up, NAT gives me two features:
1. Multiple machines on the single-address allocation the ISP gives me. 2. Decoupling of mt local network addresses from the ISP assignment.
I hear a lot of muttering about NATs being evil. I really don't have an opinion on the subject -- I understand some of the theoretical problems, but they've never bitten me. So, asking as a network administrator, how would the implied problems be solved in an IPv6 world?
In an IPv6 world, I would expect your ISP to sell you a /64 at one price or a /48 at another. The /48 is for if you will subnet behind your firewall, which is to say "if you are a business". What your Linksys gives you is a fairly common residential configuration - a single LAN encompassing your home.
Yes Fred I would _expect_ my ISP to sell me a /64 but at what price? It continues to amaze me that no one discussing the IP V6 adoption issues will focus attention on the obvious question ..what is it going to cost me?
Would some nice US DSL provider out there sell me 6M ADSL transport and a V6 /64 for about $49.95 please? I'll even sign a long term contract !!
If the RIR's could enforce downstream pricing policy on the IS's for V6 numbering resources we might have a chance.
BTW there is an analogy brewing in VoIP. There are proposals out there in some countries to tax phone numbers in order to support universal service efforts. A noble goal to be sure ..but the economic effect will be create a disincentive for the use of phone numbers and potentially move consumers towards the use of URI's for phone dialing. Now that may or may not be a bad idea either but it should highlight that if you price a product ( numbering ) too high people will look for ways to "route" around it.
NAT's have been the inevitable answer to the poor pricing policy of IP numbering.
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