the alleged evils of NAT, was Rate of growth on IPv6 not fast enough?

Tue Apr 20 17:19:59 UTC 2010

On 4/20/10 6:38 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Apr 2010, John R. Levine wrote:
>
>> Skype video chat, all the time, works fine.  Don't remember about 
>> file transfer.
>
> Whenever I am behind NAT and talk to someone else who is behind NAT 
> skype seems to lower the quality, my guess it's because it now bounces 
> traffic via another non-NATed node.
>
> These kind of applications work best if there is at least one 
> non-NATed party involved, especially for video etc.

My own experience is that skype quality lags that of iChat A/V, but I 
had always attributed that to iChat having better codecs.  I could be 
wrong.  iChat A/V, on the other hand, seems to have a heart attack when 
both sides have private addresses, and the firewall configuration is 
non-trivial.

But I think we're going about this the wrong way.  I wonder if we could 
change the way we do business in the longer term if everyone had public 
address space.  As an application guy, I dislike the fact that people 
have to rely on some sort of service to share their calendars.  That 
makes great sense for the service provider, and it even makes sense for 
the consumer right now due to the state of the art.  But perhaps the 
times could change.

There are lots of use cases where connecting into the house would be 
nice.  Baby monitoring, security monitoring, Smart this, smart that, 
etc.  Instead we require extra middleware to make it all work.  The 
economics are, if nothing else, a painful lesson.

Eliot