The main problem I had when I was on CGNAT was not so much port forwarding (annoying, but solvable), but with being banned from all sorts of stuff. The address is shared with so many people and one person did something stupid or malicious or whatnot. Sometimes you don't even know if you're banned or not.
For better or worse, IP blocks are still very common. It's easy to complain about this, but there aren't really any good methods to deal with persistent abuse.
Ah… that makes it sound as if we've reached a phase where IPv6 has no significant problems and saves a little bother compared to IPv4. Switch to v6 ⇒ escape false alarms from tools like fail2ban.
> IPv4 exhaustion is a real problem, it's just not enough to motivate people much.
Well, its only really a problem if you're poor. Rich people don't care - IPs are still cheap enough when you live in a wealthy country & have a decent job.
The people affected by IP address exhaustion are largely the exact set of people who can't do anything about it.
From the article, IPv4 only has 3.03 billion unique, routable addresses. The world population is 8.2 billion. So there's only enough IPv4 addresses for 1 unique address per 3 people on the planet. But of course, in reality, huge swathes of the IP address range are held by big companies (like amazon), universities and the US military.
Its very common for whole streets or neighbourhoods to collectively share a single IPv4 address. Its required, as a result of simple math.
You'll even see this in some parts of the US and UK.
What you're saying is similar to "there's limited amount of SWIFT codes", not enough for each person on earth, so each person cannot have their own bank to receive money transfers.
True, but each person does not need to have their own bank to send or receive money, they can have an account within a bank of their preference, and use that extra information to route money transfers precisely.
"But they can't route money directly" — most people will never need to.
Yeah I hear the argument that CG-NAT is fine for most people. It’s true, but kinda sad. It means most people won’t be able to run home servers, or learn to be the server for a multiplayer video game, or all sorts of other things I took for granted when learning the craft. It kinda locks in, technically, the consumer and producer relationship between computers on the internet. And for no good technical reason - just a quirk of history. CGNAT is usable; but it’s sad.
I agree that it’s diverging from what was envisioned for the internet originally, so the thing doesn’t reach its technical potential.
On the other hand, I find it beautiful that network routing architecture and network security architecture naturally converged on NATs — I think because they are easier to understand for people, and more closely reflect what’s actually happening, without some hidden magic.
The number of people behind CGNAT is huge and rising. It's collectively worth it. And really not that much effort. (If your internal business network is sufficiently entrenched you don't have to change it.)
It is enough for Amazon/Google/FB/Netflix - they start to choke on IPv4 and they also don't want to pay up insane amounts for holding IPv4 ranges. When they switch to IPv6 they have more cheaper addressing. Once they force it down by making faster services via IPv6 all the ISPs will follow right away because everyone will want to have their Netflix/YT streams load faster.
If it was a real problem, market pricing would reflect the increasing severity of that problem.
The truth is that people who care about port forwarding are such a small minority -- especially now that P2P file sharing has lost its hype -- that they don't make a visible dent in the rate of IPv4 exhaustion.
The truth is that major cloud providers such as Amazon AWS have begun to charge [more] for static, routed IPv4 addresses.
Last I checked (a few years ago, I suppose), AWS APIs were incapable of using IPv6 internally, so a VPC still needed to dual-stack it in order to use AWS cloud features. That may have changed by now.
Says you need to have an AWS NAT for that to work. And AFAIK, setting up a NAT requires an ipv4 elastic ip.
And it makes since that AWS would want customers to have their own IP for NAT64, so that if one customer does something to get the ip address blocklisted it doesn't impact other customers.
If they had increased prices in 2022 (or at least announced in 2022), then I could see some kind of correlation, but give it was 1.5-2 years after, I doubt there is a connection.
> i would expect aws needs a year or two from when they decide to charge for something new just to work out the details
The price had already dropped, and was continuing to fall, when they announced the change, so if rising acquisition cost was the primary reason for adding the IPv4 charge, it had already went away.
I think AWS has looked at a utilization graph and sees a time their current pool is get used up at current rates and doesn't want to go through the hassle of acquiring more IPv4 addresses, regardless of cost (even if it is "cheap").
I also think that they have statistic for their www.Amazon.com storefront, and maybe are seeing a good proportion from IPv6 and so figure that there's a 'critical mass' (especially mobile).
In practice the tech giants such as Google, Apple and Microsoft will dictate adoption of technology. When Chrome starts mandating or heavily recommending IPv6, adoption will reach 99% overnight. That's what happened with https: https://www.znetlive.com/blog/google-chrome-68-mandates-http...
The market price is only something like 5 or 10 dollars a month, but anyone having to pay that to be accessible is an embarrassing failure of the system. It doesn't matter whether it's a big dent in the number of IPs or not.
There are billions of people out there who can access the internet, and make themselves accessible through the internet the way they want, just fine without a dedicated IP address.
Maybe you have a definition of "access" that is different from the usual one. That's fine, but let's be honest, it's not the usual definition.
But is it "well off people not having a problem paying a buck or two directly or indirectly to an american corporation to be able to bounce traffic" which you refer to as "most people"? I can see how a few billion other people would have problems with that concept for many reasons apart from the obvious financial one.
And for everyone that does pay this "internet tax", it only strengthens the position of said corporations to be able to buy up even more of the available routable ips. It's not hard to see that the end result is very much not in the consumers favor, regardless of how unnecessary it feels for customers currently to have a real ip when all they want is kitten animations on social media.
This isn't necessarily true. The scarcity of IPv4 addresses could very well induce a lack of demand and decrease the price. You wouldn't dream of developing a technology that requires people to have an individual IP address, so you don't. This massively reduces the demand for v4 addresses. It's not as if there are users out there who will demand the features you can't implement, and it's not as if you could fund the entire IPv6 network by yourself to bring about those features. Then ISPs have no reason to support v6 because no customers demand it. Instead of increased price, the cost is paid through decreased service. Think of a congested road network. It could be well worth it to build some more roads and ease congestion, but if there is no one in the system willing to pay for it, everyone will suffer.
The network experience on Nintendo devices always seemed janky and home-grown. I feel like they built everything from scratch at corp HQ complete with wonky edge cases.
The reason that IPv6 is so lightly used is that it’s cheaper to use IPv4 + workarounds.
I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, or making any value judgment about IPv4 vs IPv6.
People and businesses don’t spend money on technology upgrades where the benefit is not measurably better than what they already have.
This is just common sense; no one wants to throw away money.
If you want people to use IPv6, then IPv4 has to fail first. As long as people keep making it work then the benefits of changing will never outweigh the costs.
BTW this is exactly the same situation as clean energy vs fossil fuel, etc. In that situation governments are actively putting their thumb on the economic scales in all sorts of ways. Again, I’m not offering a value judgment, just an observation.
Most people don’t need a public IPv4 address and can live with CGNAT.
For the relatively small number of people who do need public addresses, renting them from a cloud provider or buying blocks at auction are still economically viable, in comparison to the capital costs of upgrading everything that needs upgrading to support IPv6-only.
Have you tried using PCP to forward the port? I was under the (maybe-incorrect, and if so I would really like to learn) impression that most major CG-NAT setups supported it.
Yep, my point was just that STUN works far more frequently than explicit port forwarding protocols. Part of the reason (for better or worse) is that most major console networks (Xbox live, PSN, etc) will grade your connection poorly if STUN doesn’t work. Customers who otherwise don’t know about networking do complain to ISPs about this sort of thing.
IPv4 exhaustion is a real problem, it's just not enough to motivate people much.