Rate of growth on IPv6 not fast enough?

Tue Apr 20 19:19:52 UTC 2010

On 2010-04-20, at 14:59, joel jaeggli wrote:

> On 4/20/2010 10:29 AM, Roger Marquis wrote:
>> Interesting how the artificial roadblocks to NAT66 are both delaying the
>> transition to IPv6 and increasing the demand for NAT in both protocols.
>> Nicely illustrates the risk when customer demand (for NAT) is ignored.
> 
> This is really tiresome. IPv4 NAT existed commercially long before there was any effort at standardizing it.

Another way of looking at that would be that IPv4 NAT existed commercially despite massive resistance to the idea of standardising it. I think it is fair to say that standardisation would have saved many developers from a certain amount of pain and suffering.

It'd be nice to think that with v6 the pressures that caused v4 NAT to be a good idea no longer exist. v6 is being deployed into a world where it's normal to assume residential users have more than one device, for example.

However, in enterprise/campus environments I think the pressure for NAT66 is not because there are technical problems that NAT66 would solve, but rather because there's a generation of common wisdom that says that NAT is how you build enterprise/campus networks. This is unfortunate. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Joe