Just imagine the world was used to subnets and NAT would be the new thing to learn. Everyone would go "NAT breaks all the time" and "portforwarding is weird" and whatnot. IPv6 is not harder, people just confuse "harder" with "not being used to".

NAT is actually useful besides just avoiding address exhaustion. Many IPv6 networks are on NAT anyway, like pretty much every cell carrier, which maybe accounts for most ipv6 traffic.

> like pretty much every cell carrier

TMo US gives me a whole routed /64. Why build and staff v6 NAT devices for no reason? At least several years ago several cell carriers were all about v6 to reduce the volume of v4 traffic they carry, because v4 requires expensive addresses, expensive nat boxes, and expensive people to feed and care for the NAT boxes.

Honestly, I don't know why so many carriers do v6 with NAT, cause intuitively they wouldn't. Maybe someone else knows. I know why a home or office would do it, it's easier to reason about there.

Can you give an example of an ISP doing IPv6 NAT?

AT&T

I can't see anything in their documentation about that, or anything on forums/Reddit.

Users ask about prefix delegation and advanced configurations, but all start from being allocated a /64.

I got a private IPv6 only on AT&T cell when I checked a couple of years ago (to be clear, not a public one with inbound-deny). Will check again.

Edit: Ok not sure what to make of this now. On an iPhone rn so it's tricky, the Net Analyzer app says I have 5 2600:s on cell, which should be the public range, but my public IP according to test-ipv6.com is a different 2600: from all the above. Wonder if those 5 are actually the EPC.

There's an HN comment about them using NAT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23025344 and this forum thread https://wirelessjoint.com/viewtopic.php?p=25357

There's an old Reddit thread where someone said at first there's no NAT, but then realized there is https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/8k680y/cellular_public...

> There is no excuse other than "v6 addressing and subnetting is haaaard".

This is just absurd on its face. There are very real human, political, engineering, and financial reasons to not want to upgrade things that are IPV4 only. _SHOULD_ one do this, absolutely, but there's a lot more to it than people pulling the "hard" card. There's a bevy of reasons it IS hard, and very few of them are just obstinate luddites.

When did the post that I was responding to say anything about upgrades? The comment was about greenfield projects. I reiterate my point: if in a -greenfield- project you're not building IPv6 native, you're negligent. Get up on your reading comprehension.

If there's no IPv6 support, be an engineer and -make- some: write the software that needs the support, use different vendors that don't break it just because they are actively lazy and can't be bothered to implement RFCs that are, at this point, decades old. IPv4 needs to go away yesterday.

> Get up on your reading comprehension.

The ad hominem, nice.