Are there any home ISPs that offer external IPs for all devices on the network? (No NAT)

Question

NAT is a a real pain, and the large address space in IPv6 doesn't need it. Are there any ISPs that offer actual home routing, giving each computer a global IP address, rather than a local one?

This would definitely require a different router firmware (dd-wrt?) than the ones that home NAT-boxes usually come with, but I think they still have enough power to handle routing packets for a small number of computers.

Answer 1

You can use pretty much any ISP you want and use a software tunnel to assign public IPv6 addresses to each device. Hurricane Electric offers free IPv6 tunnels with effectively unlimited public IPv6 addresses (billions of them if you want).

You'll still need some kind of NAT to talk to IPv4 only hosts though.

Answer 2

In this scenario, you would not use a router. You would be using just a switch. A router is basically a 5 port switch (1 WAN 4 LAN) One of the ports (WAN) accepts the internet traffic. You have a DNS and DHCP server in the router as well. The 4 LAN ports are on a VLAN which connects to the DNS and DHCP server that will allow connection to the internet through the WAN port.

Many Home ISP companies also offer Business Class services which is the same service as their home lines but have a few perks. You get assigned IP addresses that are public to the internet.

However, most people do not have the proper hardware in a home scenario to protect each computer from attacks. Each device connected will be vulnerable to attacks.

Also, you are pretty much giving up your wireless access point since you would have to have static public IP addresses assigned.

All in all, unless you're planning on hosting several servers and other services, you are going down the wrong road. As Onxx said, if you have more information to what you're truly trying to accomplish, we may be able to point you in the right direction.

Answer 3

I noticed you are looking at IPV6 as part of the solution. The intent of the designers is that you would get several /64 subnets for your network. However few ISPs are up to providing IPv6 yet. Once the ISPs start serving IPv6 you should expect to be assigned a /56 or /48 block of network addresses. This will allow all your devices to have Internet addresses.

In the mean time a tunnel broker will do the same. You will need to use a tunnel to connect your network to the Internet but it definitely works. OpenWRT supports IPv6 with 6in4 or 6to4 tunnels and can provide a firewall. I use shorewall6-lite to firewall my IPv6 addresses and shorewall-lite to firewall my IPv4 addreses.

What you gain by not needing to support NAT you loose to needing to firewall all your devices. For the time being you also need to support both IPv6 and IPv4. There has been some work on 6to4 NAT to allow IPv6 only devices to connect to the IPv4 network.

Good news is that many major content providers are planning to turn IPv6 on permanently in June. Last year's World IPV6 Day has paved the way for this year's IPv6 Launch on June 6th.

Answer 4

Yes, most ISPs allow you to purchase multiple unique IP addresses. Depending on whether you rent or own your modem/router, they will let you swap it if required. You’ll have to ask your ISP for information on whether they provide multiple IPs, how much each additional one costs, the hardware required, and what support they provide to get you set up.