Good FOSS software and reliable service providers? Etc.
Sure, but NPTv6 exists, and I wouldn’t put it past an ISP to do something like that.
Network Prefix Translation isn’t the same thing. That’s used for things like MultiWAN so that your IPv6 subnet from another WAN during a failover event can still communicate by chopping off the first half and replacing the subnet with the one from the secondary WAN. It is not NAT like in IPv4 and doesn’t have all of the pitfalls and gotchas. You still have direct communications without the need for things like port forwarding or 1:1 NAT translations.
I’m a Network Engineer of over a decade and a half. I live and breath this shit. Lol.
Yes, it’s not the same, but it can be used to bridge private addresses onto a public network, which is basically what NAT is trying to achieve. If you’re running an ISP and don’t want customers to be directly accessible from the internet, it seems reasonable. In an ISP setup, you would issue private net addresses and just not do the translation if the customer doesn’t pay.
Yes, you can achieve the same thing another way, but I could see them deciding to issue private net addresses so customers don’t expect public routing without paying, whereas issuing regular public IPv6 addresses makes it clear that the block is entirely artificial.
