NSP ... New Information

Mon Jun 9 15:27:49 UTC 1997

On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Edward Fang wrote:

> This is all great and dandy, but then why does it appear that anybody with
> a cable modem this side of the sun are using static IP's.  Granted that
> the Nic probably didn't allocate the current /8 (or the next one), but I
> don't see any (and didn't see any prior) 'investigation' to make dynamic
> allocation possible (or using RFC1918 addresses).  Are they looking at
> DHCP or RFC1918 as a solution for their userbase ? 
> 

We're doing cablemodems out of RFC1918 address space using PIXes in
several communities and it hasn't been fun. Many of the latest-n-greatest
network apps (games, video, voice, what have you) are broken by NAT. They
seem to like to transmit the client's address at the application layer.
This of course doesn't work, since the client's address is 10.x.x.x... 

You can dismiss this problem by saying the apps are broken (which they
are), but the simple fact is our customers want to use these apps.

I'd recommend DHCP. In communities where we've used it, it has worked
fine and not caused any of the problems that NAT does.

Regards,
Joel Gallun
Community Networks