> Datacenter networks are an entirely different beast to SME and SOHO business networks.
SOHO networks just use what providers gives them. I am not sure, why are you jumping from large “oil-and-gas corps” to SOHO, though.
For SOHO providers will be building IPv6-only networks with NAT64 to access the legacy IP. I am seeing it happening: I saw multiple situations like this with guest wifi already. Obviously, this trend is going to continue.
> Yes, you literally can stack a dozen commercial IPv4 firewall/routers behind each others networks and a PC plugged into the very last one will have no problems access Google on the browser. Because of NAT, which all IPv4 capable personal/SOHO/SME routers do by default.
… and then Google blocks it all because the amount of requests from a single IP exceeds their expectations. I have seen half of Belarus blocked by Google because their NAT pools were overprovisioned. When I was at Cisco, a customer asked us to change the NAT behaviour so, that it uses pool not “first, all ports from the first IP in the pool, then all ports from the second IP, etc” to “first port from the first IP, then the first port from the second IP, etc”. The reason was, their starting IPs in the pool were always oversubscribed and blocked. The alternative behaviour broke FTP, SIP even with application-level fixups because the protocols don’t expect signalling and data to use different IPs.
Not to mention, SOHO routers just don’t have enough capacity to maintain translation cache so connections will be randomly dropped.
> Too slow for some common use cases in industries I deal with.
Have you tried it? Renumbering event means sending two RA packets: one to expire an old prefix, another to announce a new one. While technically it’s slower than changing routers on the NAT gateway, I wonder what are your requirements.
It doesn’t allow load balancing, which is true. Work is being done in IETF to support for client-based load balancing, see RFC7157, etc. In my experience, load balancing is rarely happening in such scenarios because it will result an overloaded link when either on two goes down. Anyway, I don’t argue, it is something that could be improved.