02-19-2021, 08:41 AM
(02-18-2021, 06:36 PM))TRS-80 Wrote:(02-17-2021, 07:31 PM)Zebulon Walton Wrote: Is carrier-grade NAT being used only for IPV4 addresses, or are they assigning publicly-accessible IPV6 addresses?
That's a good question. I rather doubt it, but it would be very interesting if they are.
This is kind of a tangent, but IPv6 was supposed to bring back the original internet concept of transparent end-to-end communication between nodes. NAT is a grotesque hack that was supposed to be a temporary band-aid to preserve the IPv4 address space when it became obvious that it was inadequate for the growing internet. NAT was never intended to be enshrined as S.O.P. In fact as I recall, originally IPv6 was not going to support NAT at all because the vast address space made it unnecessary. The capability was ultimately included, though its use is discouraged. I have no idea what approach cell phone carriers are using in their IPv6 networks.
When TCP/IP was originally being developed there were some who wanted to use 48-bit addressing. If that had been done we probably would have never seen NAT, but the the larger address space was rejected due to the limitations of hardware at the time - it just took too much in the way of machine resources to process 48-bit addresses. (People sometimes complain about the Pinephone hardware being low-end, but 40 years ago the idea of a pocket-size computer with gigabytes of memory and storage equipped with a quad 64-bit processor, all for a couple of hundred dollars, was pure science fiction fantasy. Back then even mainframes didn't have that kind of power and capacity.)
https://security.stackexchange.com/quest...t-any-more