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[v6ops] IPv6 for mobile

Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se> Tue, 21 December 2010 16:54 UTC

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Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:56:17 +0100
From: Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>
To: v6ops@ietf.org
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Subject: [v6ops] IPv6 for mobile
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First off, this information is regarding the mobile side only, not wifi.

We inventoried what kind of devices held IPv4 addresses in our mobile 
network totally (we don't do NAT currently). This includes both phones and 
dongles for mobile broadband, WAP traffic etc. Just a dump of IPv4 
addresses held at a single point in time, mapped these into phone models 
and guessed what OSes they were.

A very significant portion of the addresses held were Android and Apple 
iOS devices (I don't want to give away the details on exact numbers 
because I haven't been okeyed to publicise these yet). They don't support 
IPv6. Another large part was USB dongles from Huawei. No IPv6 support that 
we have been able to discern (at least not in the connection managers 
shipped with it). Another significant was just plain non-smartphones. No 
IPv6 support in sight that we know of.

The only platforms having any significant IPv6 support are Nokia phones 
based on Symbian and Maemo, and they're not a large portion of addresses 
held in our network, not even close to be large enough to warrant doing 
any IPv6 on the mobile side as a commercial service.

Thus, the conclusion is that IPv6 in the mobile network is not deployable 
today in real life. We're going to have to start NATing when we run out of 
new addresses to add to the smartphone explosion of "always on" we're 
seeing. We tried to do the right thing, it doesn't work in real life right 
now or in the near future as far as we can see.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se

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