FAQ
Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT, also known as large-scale NAT), is a way of sharing a public internet address with multiple customers. The method is similar to what your router/modem at home has been doing for years to allow your devices at home to share one public address received on your internet connection to make the internet work. It has also been used widely in the mobile phone space to allow everyone’s mobiles to have internet access.
With the world running out of IPv4 addresses and the cost of obtaining more on the private market becoming more and more expensive we have had little choice but to implement CGNAT to keep our prices competitive. By implementing CGNAT we have been able to continue to provide IPv4 connectivity to our customers while the internet continues to adopt IPv6.
Most Leaptel customers will not notice any difference in their connection with CGNAT on. The only change will be a different IPv4 address assigned to your modem or router. If you have a static IP there will be no change to your service and your IP address will not change, you will not be participating in CGNAT.
Yes. CGNAT offers greater security as you are behind another layer of fire-walling. As your router is no longer directly exposed to the public internet, it does make it harder for someone to break into your router. This means if your router for some reason has a security flaw, CGNAT may protect you. For most customers this will offer another layer of protection.
There are some things which CGNAT is not going to work for. Thankfully CGNAT has been around for a number of years and most of the services we use today are fully compatible with it. Services which may not work generally require port forwarding such as:
- Hosting of servers – if you host a server on your internet connection such as web server, email server, security cameras (where you need to do a port forward to access)
- Older games – some older online games may experience some issues due to requiring port forwarding to work
If you have any questions please contact our support team and they can assist you.
To opt-out all you need to do is login to our members portal and do the following:
1. Go to https://members.leaptel.com.au/ and login
2. Click on your service:
3. Under the service summary turn CGNAT off:
4. Your internet connection will now reset and CGNAT will be turned off.
There will be absolutely no change to your service if you have purchased a static IP address.
An IP Address is an address assigned to your computer similar to the way every home has its own address. The addresses are used to tell packets (data being sent over the internet) where they came from and where they are going.
Currently, along with most of the internet we use IPv4 addressing which comes in two types public addressing and private addressing.
A public address is an address which is accessible anywhere on the internet. A private address is an address which is hidden behind a public address by network address translation (NAT) to allow private addresses to access the public internet.
IPv6 is still being deployed across the internet and we are working hard to enable our network to be IPv6 enabled soon. However there are a number of issues that we need to address on our network as well as the manufacturers of modem/routers located in peoples homes such as yours, in order for it to work successfully.
We hope to have more news on this soon.