Well it’s official, our new company gogo6 is up and running!  In a deal that took six long months to complete, gogo6 is taking over from where Hexago left off.  You’ve probably heard the saying, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Well in the case of IPv6 it’s a long distance relay race, not a marathon.

When Hexago was founded it was believed the migration to v6 was only a few years away.  It was believed that the path there was v4 -> dual stack -> v6.  But when the network engineers lost their drawn out battle with the bean counters, migration elegance was forever lost to practical coexistence and the tenets upon which Hexago was built needed to change – to be broadened.

So the baton is now passed to gogo6.  A fresh company with a new point of view, where everything we do is about solving the hard problems around creating v6 interoperability in a world running low on v4.  Besides expanding our product line, expect us to tighten up the go6 community so everyone involved can benefit from each other’s experience in their pursuit of v6.

Now that the buyout from management is complete, we are starting up with the energy, vision and experience necessary to cross the v6 finish line.  Hope to see you there.

Bruce Sinclair, gogo6 CEO
bruce@gogo6.com

Who would dare to predict the year the internet will reach 50 billion addressable devices?

Thomas Noren, head of LTE product development at Ericsson sees (1) one day 50 billion devices shouldered by LTE.  He sees LTE as the truly global standard putting to rest the long and acrimonious rivalry between CDMA and GSM protagonists and even sees the Chinese third way with their TD-SCDMA aligned on LTE.  Mobile Wimax is, in his mind, already relegated to the dustbin of history.

But whether or not it will all be riding on LTE, the 50 billion mark for addressable devices will be reached sooner rather than later.  It goes without saying that to realize this vision, LTE needs IPv6. It was reassuring to see Verizon confirm (2) their support for IPv6 and it would be great to see the other early movers such as our Canadian trio Bell, Rogers and Telus, our Nordic friends Teliasonera, Tele2 and Telenor not to forget our Japanese friends NTT Docomo and KDDI also voice their commitment.  IPv6 is a minor aspect in the big LTE scheme of things but is essential for its  success as a truly global and pervasive means of communications.

While some of the world’s leading LTE proponents and experts exchange notes at world summits (3)  and the WiMax Forum has very interesting  summits (4) of its own, other parts of the ecosystem are also conspiring to reach the 50 billion device milestone sooner rather than later. Foremost amongst them is the IPSO Alliance (5), their mission as indicated by the acronym is to make sure small objects with embedded IP can communicate between each other and those of other suppliers. The Alliance organized an interoperability demo at the Interop in Las Vegas in May. Sensors from a variety of suppliers located on three continents, all addressable in IPv6, supplied over 100,000 readings on temperature, humidity etc.  As stated in the press release (6)   ” Each node in the demonstration communicated using IPv6 directly between the sensor nodes without the use of proprietary protocols, gateways or translators”.  It is easy to overlook the magnitude of this news and to what extend the gates to the true emergence and growth of the internet of things have been opened by this initiative.

It is safe to bet it will not take a decade to see 50 billion addressable things on the internet.  These things are obviously devices as the Webster tells us that device (7) means amongst other things :  ‘a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function’.

As to whether all these device things will talk via LTE,  that remains to be seen;  what is sure though is that they’ll talk IPv6.

Yves Poppe
July 2009

1. http://cde.cerosmedia.com/1U4a01afaaa3ac1342.cde
2. http://www.circleid.com/posts/20090609_verizon_mandates_ipv6_support_for_next_gen_cell_phones/
3. http://ws.lteconference.com/
4. http://www.wimaxforum.org/wimaxevents
5. http://www.ipso-alliance.org/Pages/Front.php
6. http://www.ipso-alliance.org/Pages/PressRelease.php?cmd=view&sub=05_IPSO%20Alliance%20Conducts%20Successful%20Global%20Demonstration%20of%20IP-Enabled%20Smart%20Objects%20at%20Networld-Interop%202009_06.18.2009.html
7. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/device

A few years ago we exhibited at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau.  We reasoned that the increased popularity in smart phones would drive the mobile operators to require an IP address in every handset.  This internal conclusion was supported by discussions with our Japanese customers with large mobile networks on the difficulties of managing overlapping addresses in “ten” networks and the work that was going on at the 3GPP standards committee on the requirement of IPv6 for IMS implementations.  It all made sense. 

With me I had my new iPhone 1.o.  I purchased it on a recent trip to NY and had it cracked so it worked on one of our local operator’s 2.5G networks.  With it I could demo a cool service that used proxying/reverse proxying to allow v4 handsets to take advantage of v6 addressing for NAT traversal into private home networks.  We were at the mobile show in Asia where smarter than average phones were being used in daily life, we had a nice booth with a good location, there was an exploding market, we solved a real problem and the standards committees were behind us.  The stage was set.

Unfortunately it turned out to be one of the slowest (and consequently most expensive) shows we attended.  The problem was that no one knew what an IP address was let alone an IPv6 address.  “It’s required access the Internet” I’d say.  Keith our guy in Hong Kong, would say, “It’s like a phone number for the Internet”.  Didn’t matter.  Whether explained in English or Cantonese the look would be the same, starting out with puzzlement that lead to glazed over eyes upon further explanation and finally distraction when they saw their next target in the exhibit hall.  It seemed that there was no money in this Internet thing for phones.  The demographic at the show wasn’t thinking beyond the next quarter or two. 

Fast forward two and a half years and with the iPhone 3G S, Android, Pre and thousands of cool mobile apps and it seems like the logic is finally playing out.  Good report and investigation from Derek Morr’s blog at CircleID on Verizon’s mandated IPv6 support for their next gen smart phones.  Problems are the same, swap LTE for IMS and a further diminished IPv4 pool and we are now seeing business lead the way in mobile space but do you think they’ll know what an IP address is this year in Hong Kong?

Bruce Sinclair

The Wall Street Journal reported (1) that AT&T saw wireless networks about to drown under a deluge of data. To see Youtube content uploaded form an iPhone or Slingbox rerouting a favourite television program to your smart phone gives mobile network operators the shivers. Skype over 3G in the meantime gives sleepless nights, not because of surging megabyte floods but due to nightmares of considerable voice and roaming revenues washing away.

Not easy to plan and engineer “managed transitions” under those circumstances. Defensive moves such as punitive surcharges when the customer exceeds the rather meagre number of megs most plans allow for, or forcing handset suppliers to block favourite applications, will not make you particularly popular with a young and demanding customer base who consider communication a fundamental right. Capacity increase is the obvious answer but requires investment. HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) was supposed to provide short to medium term relief to bandwidth stress while LTE would lead to the nirvana of unrestricted and presumably affordable wireless broadband access. In the meantime the villain of 3G and 4G protagonists remains mobile Wimax which could provide a viable alternative, opening their lucrative market to unwelcome newcomers.

Faced with deluges of data and floods of handsets and applications, a drought of IP addresses might seem trivial.

Over the last three years growing demand for mobile data has been met by rapid fire announcements and deployments of HSDPA (2) and HSUPA (3) and now of souped up versions like HSPA+ (4). The only glitch was that this carefully planned evolutionary path did not anticipate the iPhone and the cohort of smartphones or the nascent Netbook phenomenon. Once again, a cocktail of creativity and new technology provided the proverbial discontinuity. Only possible answer: bring the Long Term nearer and deliver LTE now! Verizon, Teliasonera, NTT Docomo and other heavyweights now plan LTE deployment starting in 2010! As of May 27th thirty one operators are already be committed and the race is on to gain a competitive advantage. Ten of them plan initial commercial deployment by end of next year!

‘IPv6 Transition Considerations for LTE and Evolved Packet Core’ is hardly the title for a novel to read on your next plane trip’ but time has come to go through this excellent white paper (5) published in March by 3G Americas.
As their president, Chris Pearson, stated: “The time is now for the entire converged wireless ecosystem of operators, vendors and regulators to fully plan and implement IPv6 transition strategies to ensure our great industry continues to prosper” adding that as today’s four billion wireless subscribers transition to Internet-capable mobile devices, the need for IPv6 addresses becomes more apparent.

Well, time to act might come sooner than anticipated; while many remain unfazed by the imminent prospect of a severe drought of internet addresses, the very idea of drowning under a deluge of data is definitely not palatable. Mobile Network Operators need LTE. LTE needs IPv6. Ergo they need IPv6. Does the syllogism hold?

Maybe 3G Americas and GSMA should consider sending a friendly reminder to their constituents, as ARIN did to theirs last month (6). Some constituents are member of both and if they fear neither drought nor deluge, well..

Yves Poppe
June 2009

(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124344227596159029.html
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Speed_Uplink_Packet_Access
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_HSPA
(5) http://www.3gamericas.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=pressreleasedisplay&pressreleaseid=2150
(6) http://www.arin.net/knowledge/about_resources/ceo_letter.pdf