On Apr 20, 2010, at 7:53 AM, John Levine wrote:
But regardless of what it is called people usually know what they signed up for and when what has worked for the 5-6 years suddenly breaks ...
If a consumer ISP moved its customers from separate IPs to NAT, what do you think would break? I'm the guy who was behind a double NAT for several months without realizing it, and I can report that the only symptom I noticed was incoming call flakiness on one of my VoIP phones, and even that was easy to fix by decreasing the registration interval. The other VoIP phone worked fine in its default config.
Did you use Yahoo IM, AIM, or Skype? Did you use any of those for Video Chat and/or to transfer files? Did you do any peer to peer filesharing? Did you play any MMOs? Did you run any services?
Other than the .01% of consumer customers who are mega multiplayer game weenies, what's not going to work? Actual experience as opposed to hypothetical hand waving would be preferable.
I hate to break it to you, but they are not 0.1%, they are more like 15%. When you add in the other things that break which I have outlined above, you start to approach 75%. I would argue that 75% is a significant and meaningful fraction of an ISPs customer base.
I'm not saying that NAT is wonderful, but my experience, in which day to day stuff all works fine, is utterly different from the doom and disaster routinely predicted here.
Perhaps your day to day is different from others. Perhaps people here generally think in terms of servicing all of their customers. Perhaps in many cases if just 1% of our customers are on the phone with our technical support department, we are losing money. YMMV. Owen