what about business users, bernard?
vint
My understanding is that the fraction of enterprises deploying NAT is
much larger than in consumer households. Almost all commercial firewall
products now support NAT. In comparison, fewer firewall products support
competing approaches (such as SOCKS, or RSIP).
And of course, as the address space continues to run out it is likely
that enterprise and perhaps even ISP NAT deployment will increase
substantially over the next few years.
What is worth thinking about is what this will imply for the future
internet architecture. It is one thing to address issues brought up by a
single well functioning NAT within the same administrative domain. It is
another thing to deal with multiple layers of perhaps not so well
implemented NATs which may not even support tunneling of IPv6.
And that is where we appear to be headed over the next few years.