Nathan Ward wrote:
On 17/02/2007, at 3:23 PM, Alastair Johnson wrote:
I wonder how many large ISPs are currently looking at NATing their dialup pools. Given that most people still using dialup these days don't actually need end-to-end connectivity, and it's low-bandwidth/low-connection volume (and reasonably easy to implement on the NAS, rather than needing giant NAT boxes), it's a quick win to reclaim some address space if you're really hurting.
Indeed. It's also likely that many of those customers are running older machines, and are more susceptible to attacks of some flavor directed at their network interfaces. If they are behind a NAT, these customers are more likely to be protected.
Yep, that is a very valid point.
Those who need to run mail servers or something are on static IP addresses anyway. Those who want to run non-NAT-friendly applications can pay an extra $5/mo (or nothing, maybe) for the "full" service, and get a public IP when they dial in.
Yes - a bypass mechanism is also important for the customers that insist on it, or have some incredibly weird protocol they're using, but the volume of these is so, so low.
<tongue in cheek> Then, (if you choose to charge it) use that $5/mo to fun IPv6 deployment. If that doesn't give you enough $, the bulk of your customers clearly don't need end-to-end IP that much, so go home, and have a beer.
Funnily enough, this is what one large telco does (they're not NZ based, fwiw) - they have an internal profit center for v4 allocations, so every group which requests/assigns space has to cough some amount up for their new space, which goes towards their "v6 development fund". I suspect they may be in the situation you propose - except they use it as the beer fund.