Charles and others; Thank you very much for the information.
As for the performance issue, can someone give me a pointer to *INEXPENSIVE* NAT box which can operate at 100Mbps, or better, 1Gbps?
Inexpensive can be a pretty loose term.
Oops, sorry. As you might know, with Ethernet, the cost of a 100Mbps OE is about $200, pair of which will be used for each subscriber. (I'm overestimating the cost of OE by not assuming a dedicated hardware) So, a 100Mbps NAT box should costs $100 or, maybe, $200. Actually, 100Mbps case is not very realistic, because of the management cost. A 1Gbps NAT box may be shared by 100 subscribers and may cost $10000 or, maybe, $20000.
I was asked by ISPs which are beginning to offer 100Mbps Ethernet service to subscribers.
They probably have a little cash then...
They have little cash to be spent on equipments provided for each subscriber and replaced two years later.
My guess is that there is none.
This product, while primarily a firewall, demonstrates that doing NAT and firewalling (lots of shared code there, see IPFilter) on an ASIC makes for a much cheaper solution than FW-1 on a big Sun Ultra-something...
Hmmmm, $109,000 seems to be too expensive.
Anyhow they claim lots of sessions:
Each subscriber won't need so many sessions. Masataka Ohta