On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 02:22:40AM -0700, pmb+nanog@sfgoth.com said: [snip]
You've got to be kidding. Do you think it's clear to the average consumer buying a GPRS phone what NAT is, and why they might or might not want it?
The average customer buying a "web-enabled" phone doesn't need a publicly-routeable IP. I challenge anybody to demonstrate why a cell phone needs a public IP. It's a PHONE, not a server.
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.
If providers assume that GPRS devices are all just "web-enabled phones", then that's all they will _ever_ be, and no one will care, and no one will buy them. If all I want is a PHONE, not a server, I can buy that today (and Cingular doesn't have to spend millions to deply a whole new backend.)
*nod* I'm as much a fan of new gizmos and new features as anybody (heck, my cell phone does ssh! (it's a VisorPhone running TGssh)), but I think until we get an infrastructure that can scale to support assigning a routeable IP to even the _current_ number of cell phones, we need a stopgap measure in the meantime. NAT is a good contender for that measure. IPv6 is, IMHO, the ultimate solution, but I'm not sure we're there yet.
IMHO, the attitude of "we already know what services you want" is at odds with the intent of the Internet, and exactly the BS that Telcos have been feeding customers for years.
I apologize if that was the attitude that I conveyed; it is most assuredly _not_ the attitude I hold. I merely meant to convey that a workable solution now is better than the perfect solution 5 years from now. No reason why we can't have both, though.
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?
-pmb
-- Scott Francis darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t Systems/Network Manager sfrancis@ [work:] t o n o s . c o m GPG public key 0xCB33CCA7 illum oportet crescere me autem minui