RIPE our of IPv4

Brandon Martin lists.nanog at monmotha.net
Tue Nov 26 04:26:28 UTC 2019


On 11/26/19 4:36 AM, Doug Barton wrote:
> I get that some people still don't like it, but the answer is IPv6. Or, 
> folks can keep playing NAT games, etc. But one wonders at what point 
> rolling out IPv6 costs less than all the fun you get with [CG]NAT.

If it weren't for the ongoing need to continue to support IPv4 
reachability (i.e. if we'd flag-day'd several years ago), I think the 
(admittedly non-scientific) answer to that question is that we have 
already passed it.

However, in the face of continuing need for IPv4 reachability, I'm less 
sure.  I think that the incremental cost to deploy and support IPv6 is 
probably no more than the incremental savings of CGNAT headaches for 
service providers caused by offloading what traffic you can to native 
IPv6.  Those savings from not just from capacity savings (which can be 
extreme to totally trivial depending on your size) but also support for 
having 3rd party services properly treat an SP customer as an individual 
customer rather than the results of multiple SP customers being lumped 
onto a small CGNAT target pool.

That is, even if you are 100% committed to needing to run a functional 
CGNAT as a service provider and deal with everything that entails, I 
think it's probably STILL in your short-term economic best interest to 
deploy IPv6 simply due to the reduction in scope of "everything that 
entails".
-- 
Brandon Martin



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