On 28 mar 2006, at 13.46, Keith Moore wrote:
NAT is a dead end. If the Internet does not develop a way to
obsolete NAT, the Internet will die. It will gradually be
replaced by networks that are more-or-less IP based but which
only run a small number of applications, poorly, and expensively.
...or you will see an overlay network build on top of NAT+IPv4
that abstracts the shortcomings away - aka what the peer to peer
networks are doing. End-to-end addressing...
the overlay networks depend on having some hosts that aren't behind
a NAT to serve as tunnel endpoints for hosts that do. this will
become less viable in the future as IPv4 address space gets more
and more scarce.
also, for the most part, overlay networks do not perform as well as
native networks (there are exceptions, as in bittorrent). so they
do not abstract (all of) the shortcomings away.
They don't, but they do give the users back some of the benefit's
they lost from being behind the NAT. However, that is now
transpartent to the user. "Uh, I can't buy this VoIP service for some
technical reason, but this cool Skype stuff just works...".
The problem is that for the users to get away from the NAT swap, they
will need to go down the operators "value-added-services-path".
OTOH, one transition path away from NATs might be to extend NATs so
that they support creation of overlay networks. such devices could
also aid v4/v6 coexistence.
I think you will see v4+NAT && overlaynetworks && IPv6-for end to
services the providers want to sell (see IPTV and VoIP). Note, that
this is end-to-end INSIDE the providers network. There is no
incentive (yet) for providers to allow end-to-end on the Internet.
- kurtis -
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