At 11:34 AM -0700 5/2/02, Scott Francis wrote:
And what if I want to invent the next big thing? A game, that people play in real time, with their palm-sized gizmo. What if that game can't be made scalable unless those devices have real IPs? What if that game is the catalyst that causes a million more customers to go buy a gizmo from Cingular?
That's a lot of "if"s. As one other person wrote, IPv6 will probably be the answer here - the only question is, how long it will be before it becomes de facto (i.e. all standard networks support and transit it, by default), and how much pain we will have to endure before this is the case.
Well, I'm looking at it from Cingular's perspective. They want to roll out a new service. They want to make more money off it than from the old service. They're willing to invest a bunch of money in new equipment if it means they'll get enough people to sign up to pay for it. This service is called GPRS. If IPv6 is the answer, and it isn't available until the _next_ itteration of this process, then _this_ itteration isn't going to be as profitable as it could be. Cingular isn't going to redesign their backend a year from now just because IPv6 is suddenly usable. Mobile-IP devices are all about bringing the Internet to your pocket. That doesn't mean just the web! The web is UI optimized for a desktop machine. Who knows what specific applications might be developed for a user accessing the Internet from a device the size of a bar of soap? What if I want to write CUSeeMe for mobile phones? Or a scavanger hunt game? Something that takes advantage of the mobility rarely found by a desktop user? It is these _form factor specific_ applications that will drive the sales of devices that utilize this new network. Surfing the web is just the tip of the iceberg that everyone already understands. If that's the only application enabled by GPRS, then I don't forsee GPRS phones selling in leaps and bounds. It seems like providers would be spending a whole lot of money to upgrade their network for just one new application that only a few customers are asking for.
I have yet to see any good argument for why mobile-IP providers should use NAT instead of routable space. And no, "because they might get rooted" is not a good reason. That's the responsibility of the device designers, NOT THE NETWORK.
And I still have yet to hear a convincing argument for why _right now_, NAT is not, at the least, a workable solution to this issue. It can surely hold us for a year or three until IPv6 has become the standard. (that timeframe may be a bit optimistic ...) Given current devices and technology, why is NAT not a temporary solution?
A temporary solution to what problem? Assuming the network can distribute NATed addresses, why can't it distribute real ones? Maybe I'm missing something. John Beckmeyer didn't say why they were looking into using NAT, he only asked if anyone else was using it on this scale. The presumption of the first several responders was that it was to conserve addresses, which they pointed out is not actually necessary. I'm hoping that was the case, and that maybe the choice of NAT can be revisited... -pmb