Service providers that NAT their whole network?

Wed Apr 20 01:13:28 UTC 2005

On Apr 19, 2005, at 5:25 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:

> That makes very little sense to me since the smaller providers can get
> a /22 directly from ARIN.

Sometimes resources that are come from a regional registry are not  
welcomed by a national operator. This can go for AS numbers as well as  
addresses. And sometimes a national operator is the only way out.

I doubt that this becoming more common; sadly, it's probably not  
becoming less common either.

TV

> I, personaly, would never purchase service from a provider that  
> insisted
> on sticking me behind NAT.
>
> SPRINT PCS does not NAT my cellphone.  I receive a dynamic address at
> connection time, but, it is a real address.  What they do that annoys
> me is they block UDP Port 53 to non-sprint nameservers, and, the phone
> browser is hard-coded to a particular sprint HTTP Proxy server.
>
> If the practice is becoming more common, that is very unfortunate.
>
> Owen
>
>
> --On Tuesday, April 19, 2005 9:09 AM -0400 Philip Matthews
> <matthews at nimcatnetworks.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Thanks to everyone who replied to my question about NAT usage
>> in service providers (see original posting below).
>> I got a lot of private replies, as well as those
>> who posted to the list.
>>
>> To summarize:
>> It seems that there are quite a few providers who do this.
>> I was told of at least 24 providers in the U.S., as well as providers
>> in Canada, in Central America, in Europe, and in Africa which which
>> do this.
>>
>> It was suggested by a number of people that this was quite common
>> on WiFi access and for data services on cell phones.
>> I also heard about a number of cable access providers that do this,
>> and its use on DSL access was mentioned a couple of times.
>> (Many people didn't say what access types were affected, so I don't
>> feel I can derive any meaningful statistics).
>>
>> A number of smaller providers told me that they do it because they
>> simply cannot get enough routable IP addresses from their upstream
>> providers.
>>
>> If I was to speculate, I would guess that the practice might be more
>> common amongst newer providers, and with newer access methods on
>> more established providers.
>>
>> - Philip
>>
>>
>>
>> Philip Matthews wrote:
>>>
>>> A number of IETF documents(*) state that there are some service  
>>> providers
>>> that place a NAT box in front of their entire network, so all their
>>> customers get private addresses rather than public address.
>>> It is often stated that these are primarily cable-based providers.
>>>
>>> I am trying to get a handle on how common this practice is.
>>> No one that I have asked seems to know any provider that does this,
>>> and a search of a few FAQs plus about an hour of Googling hasn't
>>> turned up anything definite (but maybe I am using the wrong keywords
>>> ...).
>>>
>>> Can anyone give me some names of providers that do this?
>>>
>>> Can anyone point me at any documents that indicate how common
>>> this practice is?
>>>
>>> - Philip
>>>
>>> (*) Some IETF documents that mention this practice:
>>>     - RFC 3489
>>>     - draft-ietf-sipping-nat-scenarios-00.txt
>>>       (now expired, but available at
>>>
>>> http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/02jul/I-D/draft-ietf-sipping-nat- 
>>> scenari
>>> os-00.txt
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.