IPv6 woes - RFC

Mon Sep 13 00:16:09 UTC 2021

On 9/12/21 4:59 PM, Randy Bush wrote:
>> I doubt many vendors were chomping at the bit to support CGNAT
> definitely.  they hate to sell big expensive boxes.

Back in the early 2000's the first rumblings of what would eventually 
turn into CGN started popping up at Cablelabs. I went to the EVP of 
Service Provider and basically told him that he had a choice between 
that mess or developing ipv6. I doubt he was interested in doing 
anything at all, but he chose ipv6, at least in the abstract. Steve 
Deering and I then went around to all of the BU's trying to figure out 
what it would take for them to implement ipv6 in the routing plane. 
Cablelabs was also pretty ipv6-focused too making a similar calculation.

So no, they weren't interested in it either. They were completely driven 
by what the providers wanted and what a large group of providers have 
since made pretty clear is that horrible hacks are fine by them if it 
gets them out of a short term bind. But it's hardly uniform across the 
industry. This is a classic reverse-tragedy of the commons.

Mike