Are there any CPE vendors providing MAP-T features yet? I’m working on rolling v6 to residential subscribers and am trying to understand what the landscape looks like on the CPE side, for MAP-T specifically.
What about 464XLAT on a CPE - is that a thing? I know that 464XLAT has been running for a while on some mobile provider networks, but are there any vendors out there with a decent/mature CLAT implementation in a CPE product that is ready to buy right now?
Thanks,
Tom
Hi Tom,
This article is now 11 months old, but may be of interest to you:
https://blog.apnic.net/2017/11/09/ce-vendors-share-thoughts-ipv6-support/
Some quotes:
Telstra did a presentation as AusNOG back in September discussing their IPv6 implementation which was really great to see. They have their own branded CPEs with 464XLAT. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a video of it, only a rather short slide deck. You can see it here:
I have asked several vendors we deal with about the newer technologies such as 464XLAT, and have had some responses indicating they will investigate internally, however we have not made much progress yet. One vendor suggested their device supports NAT46 and NAT64 so may support 464XLAT, but since it is incidental rather than an official feature, it may not support the full CLAT requirements. I have been meaning to do some tests but haven’t had a chance yet. It is also a higher price point than our current CPEs.
I have spoken to people who have looked into options such as OpenWRT (which supports several of these technolgoies), however the R&D and ongoing support is a significant roadblock to overcome.
I would like to hear how others are implementing these transition technologies.
Regards,
Philip
Tom Ammon <thomasammon@gmail.com> writes:
Are there any CPE vendors providing MAP-T features yet? I'm working on rolling v6 to residential subscribers and am trying to
understand what the landscape looks like on the CPE side, for MAP-T specifically.What about 464XLAT on a CPE - is that a thing? I know that 464XLAT has been running for a while on some mobile provider networks,
but are there any vendors out there with a decent/mature CLAT implementation in a CPE product that is ready to buy right now?
Good luck. I've been barking up the MAP-T tree with cable modem
vendors for a couple of years already. Since I have literally 0 buying
power in comparison to the likes of Comcast and Cox, I've gotten nowhere.
-Daniel
You may use this document, which passed already the last-call and is in the AD/IESG review:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-v6ops-transition-ipv4aas/
My co-authors may help you to get those products …
I’ve been using myself OpenWRT for such deployments.
Regards,
Jordi
Hi Tom,
This article is now 11 months old, but may be of interest to you:
https://blog.apnic.net/2017/11/09/ce-vendors-share-thoughts-ipv6-support/
Some quotes:
- The major issue is the lack of support provided by CE vendors for both older (DS-Lite, lw4o6), and newer (464XLAT, MAP T/E) transition mechanisms. Some vendors provide it ‘on-demand’ for big customers, but small and medium ISPs don’t have the same purchasing capability, creating a big issue for deployment.
- All panellists said their service providers’ products supported lw4o6, MAP-E/T, and 464XLAT, but because of the lack of support for these mechanisms in RFC7084, it is not standard in retail CE.
- There are no new hardware requirements that will exclude vendors supporting all these transitions mechanisms — it is really a matter of very few kilobytes.
- The panel agreed that minimum orders were not considered when implementing these mechanisms. For them, the fact is that IPv6 needs to be implemented, and there is a need to support new transition mechanisms and support service providers and retail users. Also, there is a need for products to pass some certification requirements (again the idea of RFC7084-bis is strongly supported by the panellists).
Telstra did a presentation as AusNOG back in September discussing their IPv6 implementation which was really great to see. They have their own branded CPEs with 464XLAT. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a video of it, only a rather short slide deck. You can see it here:
I have asked several vendors we deal with about the newer technologies such as 464XLAT, and have had some responses indicating they will investigate internally, however we have not made much progress yet. One vendor suggested their device supports NAT46 and NAT64 so may support 464XLAT, but since it is incidental rather than an official feature, it may not support the full CLAT requirements. I have been meaning to do some tests but haven’t had a chance yet. It is also a higher price point than our current CPEs.
I have spoken to people who have looked into options such as OpenWRT (which supports several of these technolgoies), however the R&D and ongoing support is a significant roadblock to overcome.
I would like to hear how others are implementing these transition technologies.
Just my own personal musing below
There several mobile providers that planning to use 5G/4G for home broadband. Some are going to focus on urban areas while others will focus on rural areas.
My expectation is that that these mobile providers will bring their existing mobile approach to the wireless home broadband space. That said, i believe 464XLAT specifically will be used in home router deployments that will have a mobile modem. These devices are likely to look more like home gateways than existing mobile hotspot pucks.
We looked into this somewhat intently ~6 months ago and had not much
luck from vendors. Barely on their radar if at all.
We used our own custom OpenWRT build on a few select, tested consumer
routers to do 464XLAT. In the end we went to dual-stack with CGN on
IPv4. I wrote up some documentation on how we did it on my blog, but in
the end I can't recommend the setup we used.
I would love RouterOS and (various mfgr) CPE support for 464XLAT, then I
would be ready to give it another shot.
It sounds like I am where you were 6 months ago. We’ve been looking at NAT64, MAP-T, potentially 464XLAT, and then dual stack with CGN on the v4 side. What did you experience with the dual-stack/CGN approach that keeps you from recommending it? Academically, that setup seems the least fraught with problems among all of the options.
Hi Tom,
CGNAT is the most supported by the technology available in pretty much every device. Even keeping an audit trail of IP/port mappings is relatively easy (look into deterministic NAT – it will save you a lot of headache). You can likely lab it up with gear you already have, unlike the newer transition technologies that we’ve been discussing.
However, from my experience, the customer impact of going through 2 layers of NAT (NAT44) causes a lot of unhappy customers. I enabled it on my home connection for a few weeks to see how it went, and I was surprised that a lot of things just worked… Youtube, Netflix, etc had no issues. But there were key things such as Facebook Messenger voice and video calls that broke, which caused my family to get rather upset with me. Console gaming is also a common area of problems. For these types of Internet services, the profit margin can get eaten up quickly by the helpdesk calls.
As a side note, from internal discussions here (ie speculation, no real evidence to back it up), home users are likely to be impacted far more than business users, due to the difference in usage.
Regards,
Philip
In my CGNat environment (~11,000 subs (5,000 dsl & 6,000 cable modem)) I had to solve issues with site-to-site vpn, console gaming and some webmail and banking web sites that seem to hand off authentication to another site and try to carry over the ip address … also had to try to accomplish load sharing amongst (3) cgnat nodes on my vrf-to-vrf boundary where I do natting… here’s some things we did…
APP - consistent mapping for priv to pub ip’s
EIM – stabilizes ports outbound
EIF - stabilizes ports inbound and allows for some hold-over (actual pinhole openings) for further comms from outside—to---->inside
AMS LB - ams load balancing to occur on src-ip for removing the chance for more ip change*
AMS Member Failure options - more of adding resilience if/when underlying npu’s fail
IGP (OSPF/LDP) routing - not cgnat related at all, and i recall more for load sharing amongst my mx960…but was a big win for us when we found the (set protocols ldp track-igp-metric) trick or causing my PE’s that would then use the real igp metric to route to the igp closest cgnat node (mx960/ms-mpc-128g) thus causing that cgnat node to always be used for that pe’s set of priv ip subs… you must know that i had a triple cgnat node boundary ((3) mx960’s w/ms-mpc’s) and here again had an issue with all traffic going to the lowest bgp loopback ip tiebreaker since apparently inet.3 has metric 1 for every prefix… that trick ldp command copies inet.0 metric into inet.3 thus giving some real igp metric consideration to the bgp best path calculation
Btw, there are keepalives for eif and sessions limits for resource issues to be considered
Nothing, sorry if my writing was confusing. It was the 464XLAT that I
don't recommend at this time, lack of vendor support by the brands we
currently use (especially Mikrotik and Ubiquiti) was the main issue.