On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 11:10:03AM -0700, Eric Rescorla wrote:
Users aren't physically handcuffed to their Internet connections.
They have choices as to who to purchase connectivity from. Those
users, if they chose, could purchase connectivity with static IP
addresses and no NAT. They by and large don't do so. Therefore, it's
reasonable to conclude that they don't in fact want them. Or, to put
it more precisely, that the marginal disutility of getting rid of NAT
exceeds the marginal utility of these new services.
And to make things even more specific, in the suburb of Boston where I
live, I have a couple of different options:
$230/month DSL.net 400kbps SDSL, with 30 IP addresses (/28)
$ 99/month Speakeasy.net, 768kbps down, 384kbps up, with 2
static addresses
$ 44/month Comcast 640kbps down, 256 kbps up, with dynamic addresses
So 30 static IP addresses, with a slower service, is over *five* times
more expensive, and over twice as expensive as faster service with
only 2 static IP addresses.
As much as I hate NAT, from an aesthetic perspective, using two static
IP addresses and a NAT box was the expedient solution. We could I
suppose blame the ISP's for their charging policies, but these
economic pressures are going to drive people in certain directions,
and as Ekr as pointed out, saying that people are either misinformed
or non-rationale isn't going to help matters.
(Put another way, sure, Voice over IP would be nice. But if I have to
pay 2x or 5x a month to an ISP in order to not have a NAT box so I can
use VoIP, wouldn't it be much more rational to stick with a wired POTS
line?)
I'm not defending the current system; I certainly wish I could have a
/22 all to myself, and not have to play NAT games. (And I'm kicking
myself for not simply registering one back when they were essentially
free for the asking.) But the reality is that NAT boxes are here to
stay, and we have lost that battle for IPv4. It would be nice not to
lose that battle for IPv6, but I suspect the jury is still out on that
point; and burying our heads in the sand about why people chose NAT's
is not going to help us assure a NAT-free world for IPv6.
- Ted