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

USA-Canada World Championship hockey games never fail to elicit great excitement. In the IPv6 adoption world league however, the US seems to have a convincing lead over their northern neighbour but the game is not over yet, here come the Canucks.

Internet evolution, and IPv6 in particular, were the major themes at the issac (1) (ICT Standards Advisory Council of Canada) Plenary meeting (2) in Ottawa mid April. Presentation of the Government of Canada IPv6 transition Strategy, including timelines, was undoubtedly the highlight of the day. Leveraging the Australian Government IPv6 transition model, the Canadian Federal Government envisages three phases in the transition; preparation (jan 2009- dec 2010), transition (jan 2011-dec 2013) and implementation (January 2014-dec 2015).

Surprising? Not really. In its quiet ways , Canada has pioneered IPv6 since its early days. Canarie (3), Canada’s national Research and Education Network, co-funded the Chicago 6TAP (4) while the Canadian freenet6 (5) tunneling service has provided more than 150,000 IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels and was, for a while, the world’s premier IPv6 transit point. The first intercontinental native IPv6 connectivity was tried out between the CRC (6) in Ottawa and Berkom in Berlin, Germany, back in 1998. Teleglobe, now part of Tata Communications, became founding member of the IPv6 Forum in 1999 and has been offering commercial IPv6 connectivity since 2004.

The Government’s IPv6 mettle will likely be tested in the upcoming GENS (7) Government Enterprise Network Services calls for tender. The goal is ambitious with the consolidation and convergence of the Government’s current 124 separate networks. Some laggards on the network and equipment supply side will likely lobby to say that IPv6 is not that urgent and that they will support it in the future anyways while some consultants will see, in many years of transition, many years of contracts.

Some of us, in the discussion period at the Ottawa issac plenary, emphasized the need for some early measurable deliverables such as IPv6 accessibility of selected public Government websites. Interesting to note that ARIN’s most recent letter (8), to ISP CEO’s, also considers publicly accessible resources such as external web servers and e-mail servers a logical place to start.

The IPv6 puck rebounds, is passed from behind the internet, he shoots, he ….

Yves Poppe

May 2009

1. http://www.isacc.ca/isacc/english/

2. http://www.isacc.ca/isacc/english/meetings/index.jsp

3. http://www.canarie.ca/about/index.html

4. http://www.6tap.net/

5. http://go6.net/4105/freenet.asp

6. http://crc.ca/en/html/crc/home/home

7. http://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/apropos-about/fi-fs/rceg-gens-eng.html

8. http://www.arin.net/knowledge/about_resources/ceo_letter.pdf

Here’s a presentation on IPv6 Tunnel Brokers given at ARIN XXIII in San Antonio last month.  Other interesting presentations can also be found on this page, including one from Alain Durand on DS Lite which has been getting a lot of attention lately. 

Bruce

If you are new to IPv6 and looking for the fundamentals dished out in a palatable form, check out the 6deploy site’s e-learning package.  6deploy is a European project, partially funded by the EC, with a mission to provide operators and service providers with IPv6 training and support for deployments.  The site is dense, as many European funded projects usually are, which makes this package that much more appreciated.  This definitely belongs in our future IPv6 101 section.

Bruce Sinclair

A well written paper by the folks at DREN, the Defence Research and Engineering Network under the Defence Department’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program, can be found here: DREN Success Story. 

DREN, an early Hexago customer, is credited with having the first operating IPv6 network in the US government and this paper describes their real world experience in getting it operating and what they have identified as their six key factors of success.

DREN is leaps and bounds ahead of the US government OMB mandate which, among other things, dictated that by June 30, 2008:

“All agency infrastructures (network backbones) must be using IPv6 and agency networks must interface with this infrastructure. Agencies will include progress reports on meeting this target date as part of their EA transition strategy.”

Now, many US government departments and agencies interpreted this to mean flowing IPv6 packets between two core routers conveniently forgetting about the “interface with this infrastructure” part but not DREN.  They went above and beyond and ahead of schedule in their implementation and, in their words, “It is now time for federal stakeholders to travel the trail blazed by the DREN” or in my words “it is high time to get this party started”.

Bruce Sinclair

Is the glass half full or half empty? The human reflex of selective deafness to information or arguments countering  one’s established believes lives on.  The ISOC organized lunchtime IPv6 panel (1) at IETF 74 in San Francisco   illustrates the point. The half full perception is exemplified by one write-up (2) on the event, the half-empty by another (3). A third write-up (4) seems to be the closest to what constitutes objectivity,  uncorrected for any confirmation bias of my own. 

Natural pessimists continue to hide behind lack of business case, ROI, lack of customer demand, cost, complexity.  Mention lack of backward compatibility and it appears under title of “fatal flow for IPv6” (5), mention a “broccoli approach to IPv6 implementation” and the bias will depend on whether or not one likes broccoli.   When forced  to swallow, they will probably go on a diet of hard to digest transition technologies and NATcho’s.

Natural optimists see a new world of applications and phenomenal opportunities stirring under the surface of the internet.  They integrate IPv6 as part of their network equipment and service upgrade cycles and consider new application domains to satisfy humanity’s insatiable hunger to  search, consume, produce and exchange information anytime, anywhere .  When Google turned on AAAA’s for Google Maps, IPv6 traffic tripled within days. Trapped underground IPv6 lakes start to break the surface of an increasingly arid and parched IPv4 internet. 

Maybe there are is a genetic base and evolutionary benefit for our confirmation bias (6)? 

Yves Poppe
April 2009

1. http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ipv6panel/
2. http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/03/internet-society-promotes-ipv6-ietf-extends-ipv4-lifetime.ars
3. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/032009-ipv6-business-case.html
4. http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/internet/0,39044908,62052667,00.htm?scid=rss_z_nw
5. http://www.cw.com.hk/content/fatal-flaw-ipv6-its-not-backwards-compatible
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

The IPv6 killer application has finally been found, making sure Internet continues to run. The general consensus at Google’s IPv6 implementors conference was that the reason to deploy IPv6 is to ensure business continuity for your Internet services. The survival of the Internet is the killer app of IPv6 as one of the participants put it. The approach to achieve this is different from case to case. For ISPs the shortage of IPv4 addresses is the main decider in how the deployment of IPv6 will be done. Doing dual stack is not an option as it won’t save addresses, instead many operators are looking at different ways to rid themselves of IPv4 at same time as maintaining their IPv4 service to the end user. For content providers IPv6 deployment is way of keeping up with IPv6 rollout to ensure that users don’t run into problems by having to go through multiple NATs.

Now the question is when the Internet needs saving. There seems to be a common understanding that IPv6 will not be deployed in time to take care of the IPv4 shortage by its own existence. Instead it has to be used as a tool to extend the life of IPv4 services. This will become a reality within a next year or two when the ISPs will start to feel the pain of adding IPv4 customers in a traditional manner. At that point IPv6 will become an important part of the Internet even though a lot of users will continue to run IPv4 on their old Windows XP machines or PS3s.

Having IPv6 become a tool to keep the Internet running isn’t a bad thing, it is what IPv6 was created to do. The only thing that has changed is the way it is being done.

Anything to be aware of on layer 2 when activating dual stack ? IPv4 and IPv6 should after all peacefully and safely coexist on the same network as each version has a specific layer 2 ethernet type, 0×0800 for IPv4 while IPv6 responds to 0×86dd. The value of this field tells the node which layer 3 protocol follows in the ethernet frame. Is this new? Not really, this was defined in RFC 2464 (1) in December 1998, more than a decade ago. The IEEE Ethernet Field Registrar (2) issues and maintains the list (3) of allocated Ethernet types. And 0×0800, the IPv4 ethernet type, result of the venerable RFC894 (4), will be a quarter century old next month! This RFC defines a standard protocol for the ARPA – internet community (sic).

Remarkable how Ethernet has evolved and been widely adopted over this period extending its reach from LAN to MAN to WAN and from 10meg to 10gigE. One has to credit the IEEE for quite an efficient job as a standards body.

Over in the IP world, this month of March will see IETF 74 (5) meet in San Francisco and continue to ponder transitions, address translations, double translations, even carrier grade translations. In the meantime the IPv4 pool has shrivelled to 32 /8’s in IANA’s free pool and in Manila last week the policy session (6) at the APNIC meeting further looked at ways to cut the remaining IPv4 address pool in ever smaller pieces and even allocating them for shorter time frames to somehow delay the inevitable. The Regional Internet Registries now even have a mechanism to equitably share recovered, reclaimed and returned pieces of IPv4 address property. APNIC has even adopted a proposition on how to parcel out crumbs of the very last /8 they will get allocated.

A modern day Géricault might start painting the “Radeau du IPv4” . I felt reassured however by the growing number of IPv6 address allocations by RIR’s to local registries and ISP’s as we saw in the NRO update (7). Let’s just start using them a bit faster and pity the poor souls who will be left on the IPv4 raft .

Yves Poppe

March 2009

1. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2464.txt

2. http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/ethertype/type-tut.html

3. http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/ethertype/eth.txt

4. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc894.txt

5. http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/74/calendar

6. http://www.apnic.net/policy/proposals/index.html

7. http://meetings.apnic.net/program/amm/pan-nro-stats.ppt

At Cisco Networkers (1)  in Barcelona earlier this week,  some of us saw a dragon try to wiggle out of its shell, provided you connected in IPv6 that is.  A smile to Kame (2), the turtle which only danced under a IPv6 caress.

Networkers 2009 saw more than 3000 attendants and a good complement of IPv6 presentations highlighted by a high powered plenary panel  on the status of IPv6. It was chaired by Pat Calhoun, Cisco CTO, with outside participation from Google, Archrock, Spacenet, the European Commission, Free.fr( 3) and Tata Communications.

Anything to remember from all this IPv6 talk early in this new year? Well, if you turn it on, they come, both endusers and traffic that is. Since Free (3) turned on IPv6 on their Freebox last year in France, more than 200,000 of their subscribers activated it.  Google sees growing numbers of IPv6 searches,  ISP’s see growing IPv6 traffic…

Granted, it’s still a trickle compared to IPv4,  but the chances to see the internet  facing collapse when running out of IPv4 addresses or  become clogged with NAT-plaque , are receding.   A growing number of ISP’s are upgrading their networks to assure the continuing health of the internet and their revenues, content is on its way as are new green field application domains.  Judging from the numbers who attended the IPv6 sessions this week, not too many really want to stay behind that much longer.

We have not  yet seen the full power of the Internet Dragon,  but this week, it was stirring under its shell.

Yves Poppe
February 2009

(1) https://www.cisconetworkers2009.com/eventlink/cybercafe/home.ww

(2) http://www.kame.net/

(3) http://www.free.fr/adsl/