Beyond the NAT: The Hidden Cost of Wi-Fi
A while ago I wrote about bufferbloat, BBR and why modern internet connections can still feel slow even when bandwidth itself is excellent.
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Posts tagged 'beyond-the-nat'
Beyond the NAT: BBR, Bufferbloat, and Why “Fast” Networks Still Feel Slow
There is a particular kind of lie your network tells you.
You run a speedtest. The numbers look perfect. You breathe out. The server is “fine”....
Beyond the NAT: CGNAT, Bandwidth, and Practical Tunneling
Home internet in the 90s felt simple. You plugged into Ethernet, got an IPv4 address, and you could expose a service directly. Today the path is layered and driven by economics. IPv4 did not end in a hard way. It became scarce and costly, see IPv4 address exhaustion. Data centers and enterprises still buy and route IPv4. Most residential users are placed behind Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) and many providers mix in IPv6 to keep compatibility while lowering costs.
This post maps that landscape with a practical lens. We will move from end to end addressing to provider networks that multiplex thousands of customers behind a few public IPs using NAT. CGNAT saves addresses and reduces ISP costs, but it blocks inbound connectivity, see NAT traversal. It also complicates games, VoIP, and P2P, and makes self-hosting fragile without extra tools....