Owen DeLong describes the costs of Carrier Grade NAT and offers IPv6 adoption as the best long-term solution for IP address space exhaustion
FREMONT, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Hurricane Electric, the world’s largest IPv6-native Internet backbone and leading colocation provider, announced today that its Director of Professional Services and IPv6 Evangelist, Owen DeLong, has issued a warning about the underestimated costs of Carrier Grade NAT (CGN).
“The question of whether CGN is an effective – or even a viable – alternative to IPv6 has not been given careful enough consideration”
In a recent piece on Data Center Knowledge, Mr. DeLong argues that the most common stopgap solution to the IPv4 address-space exhaustion problem – CGN – has costs greater than its adherents are willing to admit. By further damaging the end-to-end addressability paradigm inherent in the Internet Protocol, CGN slows innovation, breaks certain applications (and makes others needlessly complex) and can increase communications latency.
Mr. DeLong begins his admonition by comparing the existing IPv4 address space to an undersized parking lot for a restaurant. Continuing the metaphor, DeLong compares NAT (Network Address Translation) to valet parking, in which the illusion of unlimited space comes at the cost of maintaining a complex translation table of customers, keys and distant parking places – and long waits at the valet kiosk.
