Comment by mort96
You mean that the packets go through a router? They would do that regardless though?
You mean that the packets go through a router? They would do that regardless though?
Your typical router shouldn't fill up its port mapping table. In fact, the 4th layer isn't involved at all so "ports" don't even exist as a concept.
Sure but none of this poses a latency or bandwidth bottleneck.
Give me some numbers then on how this materially affects latency or bandwidth.
No, I mean that the IPv4 packets go through a stateful NAT engine on the provider side, instead of going through potentially multi-path L2/L3 switching fabrics that are stateless w.r.t. the content of the packets (especially if they're actually routed L3 fabrics, not auto-discovering L2 fabrics).
Thus the packets have to take a detour through the NAT engine instead of taking the shortest physical path to the destination as they can with a plain stateless L3 switched fabric. E.g. in an AON with L2/L3 switches on the provider side of the last-mile link, you can easily bend the packets right around in that switch if you're WebRTC calling your neighbor. No need to even go beyond the curbside switch.
Other than that, it's still typically gonna be a physical detour to the NAT engine instead of going straight to the destination, as the NAT engine isn't fused into the main fabric data plane.