The return of the Walled Garden

Back from AusNOG. It's now clear that allocations of new IPv4 addresses will cease in 2010, so a lot of the conference was about NAT and IPv6.

IPv6 is too late. Although no one said so, we've basically been let down by vendors unwilling to ship product for which there is "no demand", governments too afraid of regulation to insist, and an industry too focussed on the present to lobby government to make them insist. It hasn't helped the industry/government interface that government's brain-dead content filtering plans have sucked the air from any other industry/government discussions.

So it's going to be "carrier-class network address translation". That is, your ISP will run NAT (and if you are the average customer, you will run NAT on your ADSL router too).

You are now going to need the ISP's support to run some applications. The ISP has a profitable telephony business? Then they could re-route the H.323 and SIP telephony control protocols to their telephony core. All in the name of clearer calls and increased reliability, with pricing to match. Nothing you can do about it, since their NAT doesn't support H.323 and SIP to anywhere else.

As for running your own web/mail/whatever server; that's not going to happen anymore.

That's right, it's the return of the Walled Garden. You can only do what the carrier wants, and they're going to charge as much as they can for that service. Gone will be the days of the Internet as a low rent transport.

Also, an ISP with all of their customers hanging off the One True NAT is going to be cautious about configuring and upgrading that NAT box. You want support for SNMP, sorry, too technically risky (all those ASN.1 complexity attacks) and not enough demand. You want support for the just-released protocol TuxRacerNetworkEdition? Nah, we're not going to potentially annoy our 250,000 users to satisfy 25 users.

As a hobbyist consumer, you want IPv6. Because that's the only way you'll be able to run your own services. Because that's the only way you'll be able to access the Internet, not just the interweb.

If you are a gamer, you really want IPv6. God knows what the latency will be to and from that NAT box.

Ask your ISP. Ask in your router manufacturer's forums for IPv6 support. And ask for that support in the shipped hardware you already own. They've had enough notice of the end of new IPv4 addresses, so it can only be called a bug that your router doesn't already support IPv6.