I will note that the one thing going for the home network NAT guys is
that they have focused on making things work to the extent that they
even have George Hamilton selling NATs at the poolside on TV commercials
for Circuit City.
well, maybe he can solve the NAT problem, but I can't.
The leading NAT gets the follow review on amazon.com:
Average Customer Review: <4 stars out of 5> Based on 682 reviews!
To that extent, they may have found the right engineering and usability
trade-offs for the home LAN scenario and perhaps even the common soho
solution. I did not see a single comment in the amazon reviews citing
routing issues.
that's because when people do have problems with NATs, they don't see
it as a routing problem - they think there's a problem with the software.
in a just world, the NAT vendors would all be sued out of existence
for the harm they've done to the Internet. in the real world, if you
can hire a famous personality to advertise your product on TV,
then by definition it must work well.
but at least folks in the IETF (mostly) know where the problems are.
Keith