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I overall agree, but "reliable holpunching" is an oxymoron. Hole punching is by definition an exploit of undefined behavior, and I don't see the specs getting updated to support it. UPnP IGD was supposed to be that, but well...

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Well, with v6 you're down from NAT-hole-punching to Firewall-hole-punching, which in principle should be as simple as arranging the IP:Port pairs of both ends via the setup channel, and then sending a "SYN" packet in both directions at once.

Then, trying to use e.g. TCP Prague (or, I guess, it's congestion control with UDP-native QUIC) as a scalable congestion controller, to take care of the throughout restrictions caused by high bandwidth delay product.

>> sending a "SYN" packet in both directions at once.

Might be a totally dumb question but how does this work? Wouldn’t you already have to have communication to set a time?

That's why protocols like this have what Wormhole calls a "mailbox server", which allows two ends separated by firewalls to do secure key exchange and agree upon a method for punching through directly. See also STUN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN

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