What is CGNAT and How does it work?

What is CGNAT?

Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT, sometimes referred to as large-scale NAT), is a method of sharing a single unique public IP address with multiple services, allowing service providers to extend their pool of IPv4 addresses.

What this means for you and your service is that your modem/router onsite will appear to have a private IPv4 IP address instead of a public one, and our network will then NAT that out to the web via our CGNAT network to the public internet.

Why are we making this change?

The primary reason behind the change to CGNAT is due to obtaining additional IPv4 addresses becoming increasingly more difficult and expensive as the supply runs out. So we've decided to implement CGNAT for all of our services as default unless you've requested a Static WAN IP.

This allows us to extend our existing IP pools while we work on implementing IPv6 across our network and while IPv6 is slowly being adopted throughout the internet.

How will this affect me and is there anything that won't work?

For the majority of services there won't be any noticeable difference and you should be able to continue to use your service as you would normally. The only difference you may notice is that your WAN IP may change from time to time, or the private IPv4 address on your router may change as well.

If you've purchased a static IP for your service you won't be routed through our CGNAT network, and that IP will operate as a traditional WAN service.

What won't work?

There are a few things that depend on NAT and its features to work that won't work with CGNAT, specifically anything that relies on inbound port forwards to be opened in order to function. Some examples of this are:

• Servers: Web servers, Email Servers, File Servers, etc.

• Home Utilities: Security Cameras, Home Automation, Printers, etc.

• Remote Access: RDP, locally hosted Citrix environments, or remotely accessed appliances

Accessing the above items going outbound from the service will not be affected, but if you IP lock your cloud servers you may encounter situations where access breaks due to the WAN IP changing.

How do I get more technical information on Hosted Network's CGNAT?

We would be happy to give you a more technical rundown of how we've implemented CGNAT, if you reach out to our support team at [e-mail] and we can get someone from our NOC team to reach out to you.