Noel Chiappa writes:
From: Joe Touch <touch(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu>
"what people want" (ISP operators, or at least some of them), was an
artificial way to differentiate home customers from commercial
providers.
I.e., they wanted to create a differentiation that wasn't part of the
Internet architecture, so they put one in.
NATs did other things ... but IMO mostly as a by-product of this
primary motivation.
I'm not so sure about that.
For the first couple of years that I had an ISP connection (which soon
had an early NAT box on it), whenever I called up the ISP (then, and
still, one of the largest in the US) with a service call, the first
thing I had to do was unplug the NAT box and plug in a host directly!
I don't think your anecdote contradicts Joe's claim.
In the eyes of your ISP, you were misbehaving, because you were
violating their assumption that you would use ONE (1) computer with that
connection. If you had been what they consider an honest citizen, you
would have gotten a "commercial" connection to connect more than one.
(Your service calls were just an opportunity for them to remind you
about that. :-)
Another early assumption about the consumer Internet connection was that
you wouldn't use it all the time, but only when you needed it. This
"session" concept was natural for modems or ISDN connections, but was,
somewhat artificially, included in xDSL, presumably to conserve the
valuable customer experience of "connecting" and "disconnecting".
It was only after everyone's house had multiple PC's (which was really
only after wireless became common - I don't think too many people were
willing to wire their houses for Ethernet :-) that they kind of
expected there to be a NAT box there.
Yes, eventually the ISPs had to adapt their assumptions.
But in any event, it's doesn't void my point: if people want
something, we have two choices: i) blow people off, and they'll adopt
some point solution that interacts poorly with everything else, or ii)
give people the _capabilities_ they need/want (and thereby have some
chance at minimizing the brain damage - since generally people don't
care _how_ it works, as long as it _does_ what they want).
I guess this is just a long-winded, engineering take on 'the customer
is always right'.
Yes, but it's harder than that. In the NAT case, were our (we being the
IETF) customers the ISPs, the users (in this case "end users" who
insisted on connecting multiple devices without going incurring the
costs of becoming "commercial" customers), the vendors of then-current
equipment, the vendors of potential circumvention solutions (NATs)?
These groups of customers probably didn't agree on what they wanted.
Were all of them right?
--
Simon.