Drumming Up More Internet Addresses

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

Ethan Schwartz wrote:
> If you're suggesting a lot of people end up behind a giant NAT, each
> given a private IPv4 address with a single public facing IPv4
> address...

There are many forms of NAT and one possibility might be to map between
public IPv6 addresses ad private IPv4 addresses, where each ISP customer
gets their own static or dynamically assigned IPv6 address.

This sort of NAT would also likely pass packets for all ports in both
directions, and thus be fairly transparent to the customer.


> I suppose in that regard IPv4 has become similar to radio frequency
> spectrum addressing... maybe the government can auction off blocks of
> them for billions?  I know right now the ISPs which serve smaller
> organizations are quite happy to charge tens of dollars per month for
> a single static IP, and Verizon will force you into higher speed
> tiers further increasing costs.

I'm curious to see if IPv6 is going to disrupt this business model.


Daniel Hagerty wrote:
>     It is the case that internet core routing has a scaling problem,
> ipv6 does nothing to address it, and one of the things that's kept it
> under control is prefix scarcity.  IPv6 has enabled some experiments
> on this problem (e.g. enough addressing to differntiate between
> topology location and host identification), but no clear consensus.

If so, this seems to be a real lost opportunity, given that we are
taking on the cost of a transition anyway.

Now that addresses themselves are beyond plentiful, any new system
should have also addressed the routing challenges, making it possible
for any end-user to run BGP or a BGP-like protocol to advertise their
location without the explicit consent of their ISP.

Unless that happens, the potential for "every device having a public
address if it wants it," won't be realized.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/