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OK, final NAT66 argument (Was: NAT Not Needed To Make Renumbering Easy

2009-11-09 14:48:41
I assert that regardless of whether NAT66 is a good or a bad thing,
anything that layers on IPv6 must be NAT66 tolerant.

While folk can postulate alternative universes in which enterprises
will not demand or vendors refuse to implement NAT66, there is another
area that is harder to wish away.


Observation: Without NAT44 the internet would already have run out of
address space.

I don't think this can be seriously disputed.


Observation: Without NAT46 and NAT64, we cannot transition from IPv4 to IPv6.

OK, so when I first started making this claim I was widely dismissed
as a fool, a lunatic and other unpleasant things. I think that it is
now very clear that the IPv6 transition will take at least another
decade to be near completion and that large parts of the net will not
support IPv6 access for many years to come. Contrawise, consumers and
enterprises are going to require that their ISP provides Internet
service that works with the devices they have, not the ones that
hardware vendors might hope to sell them.

When the US settled for a single lightbulb socket standard there were
many different systems in use. The only reason that a transition was
possible was due to adapters. The same will be true of the IPv6
transition.


If we accept these two observations we arrive at a proof that NAT66 is
unavoidable. It will happen any time an IPv6 device with IPv4 service
attempts to connect to an IPv6 server. NAT64 + NAT46 = NAT66.
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