Re: [v6ops] Worse than NATed IPv4? [was IPv6 for mobile]

[Gert Doering <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 11:49:34PM +0100, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Dec 2010, Gert Doering wrote:
> 
> > Actually, it doesn't.  That's just a PC with a weird access technology
> > to the Internet - but it's not a typical mobile handset with a very
> > controlled application environment and a large amount of control on the
> > side of the network operator.
> 
> I don't agree. For us as a mobile operator we so far has treated all 
> terminals the same, and the newer smartphones have more in common with PCs 
> than they have with what 3GPP might think out is special about mobiles.

I think one of the important differences is the software ecosystems on
the PC vs. the mobile.  On a mobile, you just don't have that many 
"legacy applications" that people insist must continue to work - and if
the mobile programming environment is halfway sane, apps will handle IPv6
right away, instead of the programmer having to choose between an IPv4-only
API that they know, and "something new" that they are not paid to learn...

(Or, phrasing it differently, I have hope for the mobiles, while PCs 
inevitable are a bag of legacy cruft and users that insist that a 20-year-
old game that is using IPv4 via an IPX-to-IPv4 adaption shim still has
to work...)

> > (Also, there seems to be no USB UMTS stick on the market yet that does
> > IPv6 at all...)
> 
> Well, actually we have gotten IPv6 to "work" on a huawei stick, but we had 
> to manually configure the IPv6 address in linux (logged into the GGSN to 
> find out what address it was supposed to be), as IPV6CP didn't seem to 
> work on the PPP layer from the usb stick.
> 
> So I agree, in real life it doesn't work, but we've been able to pass 
> packets anyway...

Well, since IPv6CP will not tell the PPP client its IPv6 address anyway
(it will negotiate host IDs, and thus link-locals, but never any other
IPv6 addresses -- DHCPv6 or RA will do the actual IPv6 address assignment) 
this does not sound too bad...

I'm happy to hear that, anyway.  The sticks I have tested either give up
right away when you request an IPv6 PDP, or claim to support it but fail 
to actually answer to the hosts's IPv6CP packets...

Was that with a regular firmware, or something you got for your lab?  If
"regular", could you share the model + firmware version of the stick?

regards,

Gert Doering
        -- NetMaster
-- 
did you enable IPv6 on something today...?

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