Dear UKNOF,
I have been asked to evaluate the feasibility of deploying lw4over6 with
IPv4 address sharing as an entry level option over an existing and
growing dual-stacked altnet, primarily for new residential customers.
My google foo is failing me on this one as I am struggling to find any
reports within the last few years as to how nicely various consumer
applications and devices play behind a shared IPv4 address, where each
subscriber is allocated a fixed sub-range of ports. For example, one
area I am aware of which can present a problem with CG-NATs is the use
of games consoles for online multiplayer gaming, however, I am unsure to
what extent this can now be mitigated by enabling IPv6 on the consoles
and/or moving all the NAT to the CPE to give the user full control of
port forwarding (within their restricted range) and to avoid the
double-NAT.
Before I put in a budget request for a large selection of games
consoles, online gaming subscriptions and other consumer devices to go
in my test lab, which will no doubt raise a few questioning eyebrows in
the finance department :-), I was wondering if anybody on this list had
any operational experience of running lw4over6 or similar technologies
such as MAP-E/MAP-T on a residential network, and would be willing to
share their experiences of what is and isn't likely to work. What
proportion of a typical residential user base are likely to be adversely
affected by IP address sharing? Can anybody point me to any recent
studies on this sort of thing?
I also wonder to what extent we might be able to automatically detect
and mitigate the common problematic use cases, by flagging such
subscriber accounts as candidates for upgrade to dedicated IPv4 addresses.
Many thanks,
Ben.
--
Ben McKeegan
Netservers Limited
