97.128.0.0/9 allocation to verizon wireless

Mon Feb 9 04:19:20 UTC 2009

For better or worse, Verizon hands out globally routable addresses for smartphones.  (Certainly, the one I've got has one.)  They seem to come from the same pool as data card links.

Note that I suspect that there's a nontrivial number of folk that are used to using some not quite really NAT friendly protocols like IPsec on their (targeted-for-business primarily <not iPhone> smartphones).  (Yeah, there's IPsec NAT-T, which I've seen fall flat on its face countless times.)

Breaking that sort of connectivity is likely to be hard to swallow for some nontrivial portion of some of their customers.

- S

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Bulk [mailto:frnkblk at iname.com] 
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 10:48 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: RE: 97.128.0.0/9 allocation to verizon wireless

This discussion about smartphones and the like was presuming that those
devices all received public IPs -- my experience has been more often than
not that they get RFC 1918 addresses.

Frank 

-----Original Message-----
From: Steven M. Bellovin [mailto:smb at cs.columbia.edu] 
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 3:58 PM
To: Eliot Lear
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: 97.128.0.0/9 allocation to verizon wireless

On Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:45:51 +0100
Eliot Lear <lear at cisco.com> wrote:

> On 2/8/09 5:32 PM, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> > Lastly, you've assumed that only a "smart phone" (not that the term
> > is well defined) needs an IP address.  I believe this is wrong.
> > There are plenty of simpler phones (e.g. not a PDA, touch screen,
> > read your e-mail thing) that can use cellular data to WEP browse,
> > or to fetch things like ring tones.  They use an IP on the network.
> >
>
> The term is ill defined, but the general connotation is that they
> will be supplanting dumb phones.  So say what you will,phones with IP
> addresses is likely to increase as a percentage of the installed
> base. The only thing offsetting that is the indication that the U.S.
> is saturating on total # of cell phones, which is what that article
> says.
>
Of course, my iPhone is currently showing an IP address in 10/8, and
though my EVDO card shows a global address in 70.198/16, I can't ssh to
it -- a TCP traceroute appears to be blocked at the border of Verizon
Wireless' network.  But hey, at least I can ping it.  (Confirmed by
tcpdump on my laptop: the pings are not being spoofed by a border
router.)

                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb