[rpd] Pushing IPv6 ? (CloudFlare CGNAT blog post)

[Hendrik Visage]

So Cloudflare wrote a blog post...
>> My concern is getting CG-NAT just right is non-trivial, as anybody that provides services even marginally more complex than http will attest to.  And given the above situation where hosting providers are reluctant to deploy IPv6 for some reason.
> NAT of any form is a horrible ugly hack that has consistently and for all time it has existed provided more pain than good. If we don’t get provider off the stick to provide IPv6, CG-NAT is the future we will be stuck with. Worse, it’s going to likely be multi-layer CG-NAT and it’s only going to get uglier the longer we preserve the fallacious illusion that IPv4 must be the lingua franca of the internet and all sites must support v4 and v6 is optional.



https://blog.cloudflare.com/detecting-cgn-to-reduce-collateral-damage/

Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20251029155338/https://blog.cloudflare.com/detecting-cgn-to-reduce-collateral-damage/

It contains an interesting graph:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251029155343im_/https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2YBdqPx0ALt7pY7rmQZyLQ/049922bae657a715728700c764c4af16/BLOG-3046_2.png

<quote>
To visualize the IPv4 allocation gap, we plot country-level ratios of users to IP addresses in the figure below. We take online user estimates from the World Bank Group and the number of IP addresses in a country from Regional Internet Registry (RIR) records. The colour-coded map that emerges shows that the usage of each IP address is more concentrated in regions that generally have poor Internet penetration. For example, large portions of Africa and South Asia appear with the highest user-to-IP ratios.
</quote>

Frankly speaking: 800k IPs is NOT going to make that dark blue Africa anything barely orange… never mind the yellow… and ironically, the yellow parts have the highest IPv6 deployments/usage.

Time to let go of the IPv4 space so we can seriously leave that behind and push for IPv6

<quote>
The scarcity of IPv4 address space means that regional differences can only worsen as Internet penetration rates increase. A natural consequence of increased demand in developing regions is that ISPs would rely even more heavily on CGNAT, and is compounded by the fact that CGNAT is common in mobile networks that users in developing regions so heavily depend on. All of this means that actions known to be based on IP reputation or behaviour would disproportionately affect developing economies.
</quote>



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Hendrik Visage

hvisage at hevis.co.za


HeViS.Co Systems Pty Ltd

https://www.envisage.co.za