RE: IPv4 flag day

[Gary Sparkes via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

The cybercafe? Faster and more reliable online gaming. Better VOIP services for communication. 

Gaming is something that *HUGELY* benefits from IPv6/NAT elimination. 

The SMB? More reliable/consistent SIP experience for their phones. Cheaper network hardware for the same throughput. 
Reduced complexity. Reduced costs (address space) if they're exposing anything externally / need external inbound 
access. (All wins I've gained for my customers, and yes, they're all either dual stack or v6 with edge translation for 
some networks, but with reduced expenses overall and more reliable/performant networks) 

Realistically, the only NAT that v6 should ever need is NPTv6 for the multihoming scenario (IEEE should just capitulate 
on that one, it just makes sense and it's not PAT that gives us all our problems in the first place), the rest just 
don't make sense and re-introduce complexity and issues that should be eliminated. 

IPv6 enabled me to rip out a LOT of NAT workaround code from systems I support, which greatly simplified a lot of 
things. Re-introducing PAT into V6 land as a common practice would, once again, require re-adding all those insane 
hacks and workarounds and decreasing reliability. 

We shouldn't need to solve those issues when we can eliminate them entirely. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Pedro Prado via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org> 
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2026 1:01 PM
To: North American Network Operators Group <nanog () lists nanog org>
Cc: Marco Moock <mm () dorfdsl de>; Pedro Prado <pedro.prado () gmail com>
Subject: Re: IPv4 flag day

… which sounds right (not implementing something you don’t need).

“Need” has a different interpretation for those inside a simple network and those interconnecting that network to 
everything else - a separation of values that Nat and even pat happens to handle pretty well IMHO, for the most part 
anyway, bar the well known issues.

What value the granularity of addresses inside a SMB brings to the outside if the connectivity works without that? What 
does global-capable 128-bit addressing help a cyber cafe?

I would hope that the research that goes into solving NAT/PAT issues would trickle into improvements to the end to end 
upper protocols which would eventually be unaware of how the network operates, similar to how L2 is transparent today 
(bar MTU mismatches…)

*Pedro Martins Prado*
pedro.prado () gmail com / +353 83 036 1875 (FaceTime & WhatsApp)

On Fri 19 Jun 2026 at 15:33, Marco Moock via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
wrote:

> Am 19.06.26 um 08:35 schrieb Arie Vayner:
> > To move IPv6 to the next level of SMB/enterprise adoption we need to 
> > make it easier to consume by the average SMB - which means stop 
> > saying "NAT is evil" or "NAT is not supported in IPv6", and unblock relevant IETF work.
>
> There are devices for SMB that support stateful IPv6 NAT if they 
> really need this. Although, my experience is that most of the network 
> infrastructure in SMB environments is created one time and never 
> touched unless necessary. They will also not implement IPv6 with NAT 
> unless they really need it. Same applies to various other protocols.
>
> --
> Gruß
> Marco
>
> Junk-Mail bitte an trashcan () stinkedores dorfdsl de 
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