New ISPs getting of the ground without IPv4?

Mon Nov 2 19:32:19 UTC 2015

nanog-isp at mail.com writes:

> Surprisingly enough demand for Internet services did not end when we
> ran out of IPv4. I'd like to hear from the guys and gals starting new
> ISPs how they are facing this brave new world.

I can help.  We're a cable company operating in Atlantic City who hope
to have 800 beta customers launched between November 30 and February 1.

>
> Is it NATs all the way down?

We've got two large NAT pools and a /24 set aside for customers who must
absolutely be globally routable for IPv4.  We're trying to qualify as
few customers for this need as possible.

>
> Is IPv6 the knight in shining armor?

We're going to try to deploy as many people as we can as native
IPv6-only customers but we also expect there to be a considerable amount
of protest to this idea.  In which case, we'd simply turn IPv4 on for
them and NAT them.

It's disgusting how much stuff out there still doesn't support IPv6.
We're all ready for that with NAT64 on the edge for sites like twitter
and 464XLAT for devices that support it.

But just off the top of my head, we know we're going to run into
problems with people's XBox 360s and anyone who uses PSN (that's all PS3
and PS4 users as of this writing), Skype, Android on wifi, etc.

>
> Are you getting enough IPs? If not, how are you coping? Buying/renting
> some, tunneling to somebody who has some, what?

We wish we had enough address space to give everyone a globally routable
IPv4 address; alas, we don't.

We're on ARIN's waiting list.  We're also trolling the transfer market
and keeping our eyes open for anyone who might like to put their company
up for sale for its resources and revenue.

>
> It's all good and well hearing about how you should dual stack and
> reading about how established players handle IPv6 and IPv4 exhaustion,
> but what do you do when dual stacking isn't an option and IPv6 only
> takes you so far?

We're just going to limp along as best we can until the rest of the
world wises up.  BTW, hardware NAT costs $$$.  So the barrier for entry
is pretty high right now.