On Sunday, March 23, 2014 07:10:37 AM John Levine wrote:
In Africa, I suppose, but here in North America, the few remaining ISPs that aren't part of giant cable or phone companies are hanging on by their teeth.
Incidentally, this doesn't apply to Africa today, because AFRINIC still have lots of IPv4 space to feed any new entrant to their heart's content. I have mates in Asia-Pac, North America and Europe that will be the ones sweating if they are a new start-up. A friend recently started a mobile operation in Malaysia two years ago. You can imagine the problem they are having rolling out and scaling their 3G/3G data service. And if AFRINIC do run out of their IPv4 space, I can almost guarantee you that any new start-ups in Africa will NOT be able to have "IPv4 acquisition" line items in their budget.
Also, although it is fashionable to say how awful CGN is, the users don't seem to mind it at all.
Users won't complain until the CGN starts to do bad things to their traffic, like run out of Layer 4 ports per IP address due to increasing connectedness of applications, add delay to applications getting network, CGN failure, traffic tromboning e.t.c. Operators of CGN's will cry at some point. It's different for different operators, as some are happy throwing millions of CGN $$ at the problem. Mark.