NAT444 or ?

Thu Sep 8 11:33:40 UTC 2011

As HTTP seems to be a major factor causing a lot of short lived
connections, and several large ISPs have demonstrated that large scale
transparent HTTP proxies seem to work just fine, you could also move
the IPv4 port 80 traffic from the CGN to a transparent HTTP proxy. As
well as any benefits from caching keeping connections local it can
also combine 1000 users trying to load facebook in to a handful of
persistent connections to the facebook servers. The proxy can of
course also have its own global IPv4 address rather than going through
the NAT, I have no experience with large scale HTTP proxy deployments
but I strongly suspect a single HTTP proxy can handle traffic for a
lot more users than low hundreds currently being suggested for NAT444!
and can be scaled out separately if required.

As an end user this is probably a little worse with HTTP coming from a
different IP address to everything else, but not that much worse. As a
provider it may be much easier to scale to larger numbers of
customers. The proxy can also take IPv4-only users to a dual stacked
site over IPv6, as I am under no illusions that even with IPv6 to
every customer you will still have customers behind IPv4-only NAT
routers they bought themselves for quite a while. With some DNS tricks
this might be useful for those users reaching IPv6-only sites, however
it would probably be better if they were unable to reach those sites
at all to give them an incentive to fix their IPv6.

On 7 September 2011 21:37, Leigh Porter <leigh.porter at ukbroadband.com> wrote:
> Other simple tricks such as ensuring that your own internal services such as DNS are available without traversing NAT also help.

As obvious as this probably is, i'm sure someone will overlook it!
Also other services such as providers with CDN nodes in their network
may want to talk to the CDN operator about having those connected to
directly from the internal addresses to avoid traversing the NAT, and
I'm sure there are other services as well.

- Mike