Perry, Excellent work. I've always been tempted to say "prove it" when people say [x]% of users only use email and http but end up just accepting that it's probably true. I think the amount of "protocol diversity" here is a bit higher than a truly random sample if the following is true: 1. Netizens with less clue use less ports. 2. Most netizens with less clue use dialup. 3. Most DSL netizens with less clue use xtra. 4. You didn't have access to data from xtra customers. Having said that, I think we can say *with some proof* that a large percentage of users would have serious problems if an ISP were to NAT everyone. And, if it's possible to draw one conclusion from the massive v6 thread (which I don't think it is but I'll try anyway), since NAT is not going to work at an ISP level even as a delay tactic - IPv6 must be implemented once IPv4 address space runs out. The only questions are, will people invest early to make this a smooth transition? Will one/two/more/all vendors have such an easy migration path that you don't need to migrate early? Once again, thanks to Perry, Jonathan Perry Lorier wrote:
Well, I ran an analysis of DSL customers[1] over the space of 24 hours [4] to see how many different protocols people were using. For each IP I kept track of the number of unique "server ports"[2] were used.[3]
10% of people use =< 5 protocols, 20% use =< 6 30% use =< 11 40% use =< 23 50% use =< 35 60% use =< 58 70% use =< 138 80% use =< 427 90% use =< 2144