this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Funny how many here took this to be real, judging from the reactions. To me it's an obvious joke.
Question to you guys: How do you suppose 200 million customers will share the less than 65'536 ports that are available on that one address?
A TCP session is a unique combination of client IP, client port, server IP, and server port.
So you can use the same IP and port as long as the destination is a different IP or port.
This means that in principle you could use the same IP and port to connect to every IP address on the Internet using 65536 concurrent sessions. 😆
This wouldn't help going to popular destinations, since they have a lot of people going to the same IP address and port, but for many (most?) of them you probably have some sort of CDN servers in your data centers anyway.
Fair point! I wasn't aware of any NAT working that way, but they could exist, I agree. It does blow up the session table a bit, but we are taking about a hell of a large theoretical system here anyway, so it's not impossible.
Actually we have recently seen a few content providers not upgrading their cache servers and instead preferring to fall back to our PNIs (which to be fair are plenty fast and have good enough latencies). On the other hand others made new ones available recently. Seems there isn't a universal best strategy the industry is converging on at the moment.