On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:01:25 -0500 (CDT) Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
* Nick Hilliard:
On 19/04/2010 16:14, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
The eyeball ISPs will find it trivial to NAT should they ever need to do so [...]
Having made this bold claim, have you ever actually tried to run a natted eyeball network? The last two natted eyeball networks I worked with could never figure out which aspect of NAT hurt more: the technical side or the business side.
I'm pretty sure the acceptance of NAT varies regionally. I think there's a large ISP in Italy which has been doing NAT since the 90s. So it's not just the mobile domain.
It can be tricky to introduce a new NATted product and compete with established players which do not NAT, though.
It's another opportunity to monetize things. Give people the option of a "real" IP address for $5 extra a month in case they actually need it for gaming, etc., and default Grandma's average everyday connection to NAT.
That'd be easy if you were just starting up an ISP. What do you do with your existing customer base? If their current service includes a dynamic public IPv4 address, you can't gracefully take it away, without likey violating services T&Cs, government telco regulations etc. So you'll have to go through a formal process of getting agreement with customers to take them away. Or do you have a flag fall day when after that new customers get NATted, but old customers don't? Do you offer a LSN vs non-LSN product at different price points? The price difference must be large enough for people to care about, or better described, bother with it, yet the problem might be that that discount might need to be so large that it doesn't actually cover the costs of providing a service to that customer. Thinking about what sort of discount I'd find attractive enough on roughly what I spend for ADSL Internet access, and putting myself in a customers position, I'd figure it'd be at least 10%. You'd have to state up front why you're offering a cheaper product, and for people to make an informed judgement value, they'll need to understand the problem i.e. the Internet running out of IPv4 addresses and what the consequences of NAT are. Their eyes will probably glaze over at this point, because all they want is "Internet" and don't care how it works, and are probably not going to want to accept restrictions now that might bite them in the future. At a certain point, the risks of going with a cheaper limited service, when you don't understand or fully understand it's restrictions, becomes higher than the price of the full service. IOW, if it's too hard to understand why the LSN service is cheaper, people will just pay the extra 10% - it's less riskier that way. That extra 10% is insurance.
The eyeball ISP's definitely have the easier end of things.
Considering the above issues, I'd think it's the other way around.
... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.