Good. CGNAT needs to die. Addressing is fundamental and customers deserve not just an address, but their own RANGE, especially now that it's feasible.
a man can dream.
Having said that, I’m often equally baffled at just how expensive modern networking hardware is, but as it’s pretty much all of these carrier grade networking solutions being this expensive, I’m assuming it’s somewhat justified.
That doesn’t take away the fact that NAT just adds an expensive layer of complexity on top of it, and I can imagine that in the long term, IPv6 is starting to become much more attractive.
in a sense, yes. People claiming software based solutions can match performance of hardware basic ASIC's are simply not thinking about the scale and speeds of modern core routers and switches.
For instance, taken from the blog of ivan pepaljnak[0] > It’s hard to imagine how fast switching ASICs have to work – a modern data center switching ASIC can forward billions of packets per second. For example, the throughput of Broadcom Tomahawk 31 is 12.8 Tbps, and it can switch 8 billion packets per second, or 8 packets every nanosecond.
Another thing which makes routing at large scales with large traffic flows expensive is the separation of the control and data plane. most modern datacenter routers can continue forwarding traffic inside the ASIC while its control plane encounters a failure. (usually for a few 100ms to a second, after that the forwarding table will become stale, and this cannot be refreshed without a control plane).
Having a redundant control plane isn't that expensive, but it becomes harder and harder to keep this failover fast enough if your forwarding plane is pushing more and more individual traffic flows.
Then there are still other items which one can add to a modern router to make it do more but also cost more. (think about accelerated IPsec encryption, MACsec at line rate or DWDM functionality).
[0]: https://blog.ipspace.net/2022/06/data-center-switching-asic-...
But CPU/memory is going down in cost way faster than bandwidth demand is increasing.
Regardless, its way way cheaper than buying IPv4 blocks clearly, otherwise people wouldn't be doing it.
Edit: ok, the problem isn't hardware, it's comedy license fees. https://itprice.com/juniper-price-list/cgn.html
$470k for a license to do CGNAT at 100gbit/sec. Surely these guys are opening themselves up to be replaced with some cheaper open source based software solution?