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Re: IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

2012-04-05 10:01:27
"Worley, Dale R (Dale)" <dworley(_at_)avaya(_dot_)com> wrote:
Also, NAT provides the ability to connect a small network to a service
provider that only provides a single DHCP address, or wants to charge
extra for every device you attach to its network.  NAT is a
significant technical tool in the business conflict between user and
service provider.

Having been the admin of some small offices that set up Internet
connections, from my perspective it worked like this:

In the mid-90s, we just got enough address space for our hosts.
Simplest thing to do.

Later on, that got too expensive.  Why?  IPv4 address exhaustion.
Addresses where nowhere near exhausted, but ARIN started putting
the brakes on and making ISPs justify their address use more, and
it was costing more, so "just get enough address space" started
getting significantly more expensive.  So we'd get some sort of
basic "business class" service with, say, 4 IPs, and NAT the office
behind a simple high-end consumer grade NAT router.

Did we ever do this because we *wanted* NAT?  Far from it.
A very small office doesn't care, in my experience, about any
of the things NAT provides.  Renumbering?  Chances are we'd
move to a new building across town long before that happened,
and get new Internet service.  We have too few hosts, and the
couple of in-house servers would not be any trouble.  Internal
network structure?  It's just a bunch of hosts on one switch.

It's not a conflict with the ISP.  If they could, they'd provide us
the IP address space we want at an incrementally higher price, and
we'd pay it.  They'd get more money that way.  But they can't afford
to, so they charge a price high enough to make us, the small office,
deal with the annoyance of setting up and administering NAT.  Because
it *is* an annoyance we'd rather do without.  If we could pay the ISP
a bit more for the simplicity of just having a /26 that our network
could comfortably fit in, we'd do it.

Once an office gets large enough, NAT starts to provide benefits.
But in my experience with very small offices (say, under 25 people),
NAT is an annoyance we'd rather do without if we could affordably
get the IP space we want.

In other words, it's just a natural consequence of there not being
enough IPv4 address space.  ISPs and small offices are reacting in
a reasonable way to that fact, and doing so cooperatively.  Both
of them could be a bit happier if there were enough address space
for everyone - ISPs would make a bit more money, small offices would
have a simpler Internet connection without NAT - but that's not an
option.

I haven't admin'ed a small office in enough years, that IPv6 was
not an option when I did, and I don't know what the practical
state of it is today.  If an ISP offered native IPv6 with their
regular business class service, and the host OSes on our network
just worked with it, that's what I'd have picked, so we could avoid
the choice between NAT and address scarcity.  All IPv6 would need
to offer would be the combination of enough address space to avoid
NAT, and a cost not significantly higher than the 4-address IPv4 service.

As a small office, we wouldn't worry about multihoming, renumbering,
or any of the other things that keep coming up on this thread.  We'd
just want to be connected as simply as possible.  NAT is complexity
we never wanted.
  -- Cos