--On Sunday, 20 June, 2004 19:37 +0200 Hadmut Danisch
<hadmut(_at_)danisch(_dot_)de> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 09:52:51AM -0700, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
Much as I understand the moral outrage that NATs cause in
some people's mind, NATs are still a reality AND they
(usually anyway) provide connectivity to the Internet. Have
you tried using a hotelroom Ethernet port or a WiFi network
recently? I can't remember the last time I was assigned
something that looked like a "real" routable IP address, but
as a consumer of paid-for Internet service (that works) is
there any reason (apart from religion) that I should care??
That's currently a consequence of the shortage of IP
addresses.
Actually, there is not a lot of evidence for this. I suggest it
is partially a consequence of something else. Let's assume I'm
a provider of "internet service" to a hotel chain or a random
collection of hotels. It is in my interest to keep my actual
costs as low as possible, so that my hotel can compete with the
one down the block (to offer the same limited/lousy service, but
see below). I need to assume that the folks who work in the
hotel on a day-to-day basis will know about as much about the
Internet as they do about fixing television sets. Putting in an
expert drives my costs _way_ up. Even sending out an expert to
provision the hotel has a serious impact on my costs.
So, let's consider what I want to do. I want to have an
absolutely standard kit that I can put on a truck with a field
service type whose level of training is "unpack boxes, plug in
router, plug in cables, plug in WAN feed, turn everything on,
perform a few very standard tests, return to truck". I'd prefer
that even keying in an address for the hotel's WAN-side
connection and downstream router not be on that list. The
state of the art today with IPv4, and, as I understand it,
pretty much with IPv6, is that I'm better off with a NAT and
private address space inside the hotel. If the question of why
there aren't widely-supported DHCP or equivalent facilities by
which that entire hotel router (and its DHCP server and upstream
ports) can be trivially configured remotely, ask the DHC WG or
the Internet ADs, not me. If you want to know why mail clients
can't be autoconfigured off DHCP with the hotel's local outbound
mail server, go take it up with the mail client vendors.
But, until those sorts of problems are solved, please go read
Vernon's comments again: providers are providing these low end
services between that is what people want to buy and the price
they want to buy it at. Higher levels of service would cost
more, maybe a lot more, mostly due to provisioning and support
costs and not, e.g., hardware costs or restrictions on IP
address availability. And, while I have serious doubts that
there is a large market there, if we can make service term
descriptions a bit more clear, then I can imagine a hotel saying
"ok, we have two kinds of Internet service available,
'client-only' at $10/night and 'full' at $30/night -- pick what
you want and hand us your credit card". Whether I'd be willing
to pay for the higher-end service or not, I'd far prefer being
offered that choice than "please give us your money and we will
deliver whatever we feel like and you can learn to like it".
With such providers Internet is not anymore what it used and
was supposed to be. Internet means (at least in my opinion)
that in principle every node can comunicate with every other
node.
Clients behind NAT can't communicate with other such clients.
Internet is split into clients and servers, where clients can
communicate with servers only. No peer to peer anymore.
Do we consider this as "internet"?
I don't. My religion about this may not be very different from
yours, or even from Ohta-san's. But the market has clearly
decided that people will buy such whatever-they-are-called
services and no amount of saying "naughty" or "inadequate" is
going to make them go away. And we are more likely to get what
we do want --when we are willing to pay for it-- if we help
precisely those providers understand and sell both whatever they
are selling now and what you would consider adequate "Internet"
service. Otherwise, as with most hotels and consumer
cable-modem and DSL providers today, the only thing available
will be the cheapest possible service (to provide) they can get
away with offering at whatever price they can get away with
charging for it.
john
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