Large ISPs doing NAT?

Thu May 2 08:53:20 UTC 2002

On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 01:32:16AM -0700, khuon at NEEBU.Net said:
> 
> ### On Thu, 2 May 2002 01:20:40 -0700, Scott Francis
> ### <darkuncle at darkuncle.net> casually decided to expound upon Peter Bierman
> ### <pmb+nanog at sfgoth.com> the following thoughts about "Re: Large ISPs
> ### doing NAT?":
> 
> SF> The average customer buying a "web-enabled" phone doesn't need a
> SF> publicly-routeable IP. I challenge anybody to demonstrate why a cell phone
> SF> needs a public IP. It's a PHONE, not a server.
> 
> Time to start thinking a little further down the line.  What if the phone
> actually becomes an wireless IP gateway router?  It routes packets from a
> PAN (personal area network) riding on top of Bluetooth or 802.11{a,b} to the
> 3G network for transit.  NAT would certainly become very messy.

*nod* NAT is a solution for current problems, in some situations. It may or
may not create more problems in the future than it solves in the present
(sign me up for one of those gateway router phones though - mmm...)

Again, while I'm not predicting what kind of network landscape we may see in
the future, NAT _does_ appear to solve problems in the present under certain
situations, and IMHO should not be dismissed out of hand just because it's
not "pure IP."

Forward thinking is critical - but those who do it at the expense of current
issues are called researchers and scientists, and generally are not running
production networks. :)

-- 
Scott Francis                   darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t
Systems/Network Manager          sfrancis@ [work:]         t o n o s . c o m
GPG public key 0xCB33CCA7              illum oportet crescere me autem minui
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