Carrier grade NAT

The time to transition is now.

Network Address Translation (NAT) is a technology that has been used for a long time and by now has a ubiquitous presence in firewalls and Internet gateways. Carrier Grade NAT (CGN), also known as Large Scale NAT (LSN) is now becoming the new standard.

Initially, traditional NAT was used for translating the address ranges between two networks. In the last decade, NAT has been used for virtually every household or enterprise connection, as part of a home Internet router. The main contribution to NAT's popularity is the ability to share a global (public) IP address among multiple local (private) IP addresses.

As the Internet continues to evolve and expand massively we continue to consume the resources that it was initially built with, in particular the use of IPv4 address space (111.222.333.444). IPv4 allows for approximately 4.3 billion useable addresses, which may seem vast but given both the Internet population and the birth of machine to machine connectivity with IoT this is all but exhausted.

In reality, IPv4 is already outdated. With global IP addresses at their limit, it’s best to make the shift to IPv6 sooner rather than later. But what are the costs of switching?

IPv4’s successor, IPv6, has been around for some time and provides many more useable addresses as it utilises 128 bits in its address as opposed to just 32 bits as with IPV4.

However, it is not a simple task to change existing addresses to this new form. For some older devices it is simply impossible, for others it would involve the wholesale reconfiguration of millions of devices in consumer homes and the associated problems with doing so.

As a result, we have seen the rise of new IPv6 networks alongside existing IPv4 networks – this approach is known as “Dual Stack” and often requires routers to maintain two different routing tables (stacks) and to “translate” between them as traffic passes from one network to another.

Carrier Grade NAT is a set of methods for translating either between two different IPv4 networks (NAT44) or an IPv4 and an IPv6 network. The later translation can be performed in a number of different ways.

Upgrade without sacrifice.

We’re in a strange place right now: IPv4 is spoken for and IPv6 is already in play, gaining more ground as we move forward. Simply switching to IPv6 opens you up to interoperability issues with IPv4 devices, websites, and services.

With our Carrier Grade NAT Solutions you don’t have to choose. You can easily communicate with new IPv6 addresses, with flawless IPv4 backwards compatibility. Infradata helps you manage your network in a variety of ways, consolidated on a unified platform.