IPv4 shutdown in mobile

Sat Dec 26 20:42:45 UTC 2015

On Sat, 26 Dec 2015, Mark Tinka wrote:

> One network in southern Africa have upgraded 70% of their network to 4G 
> as part of an enhancement exercise in the last 16x months, and provide 
> 98% 3G coverage across their country of operation. But not a peep re: 
> IPv6.

Out of the 34 major mobile providers in Sweden, only one has a single peep 
regarding IPv6 for regular customers. All of these have ubiquitus 4G 
coverage and have had this for 4-5 years.

> In general, in the progressive African countries, one would be
> hard-pressed to get anything less than 3G coverage in major business
> districts/cities.

Well, if most providers in Europe can't get this done, I am not surprised 
that the African ones won't get it done either. Remember that the european 
ones operate in an environment where RIPE went into last /8 policy almost 
4 years ago, and still most of them haven't deployed any IPv6 at all yet.

IPv6 only operation for mobile is going to become fairly easy in the next 
few years due to the entire ecosystem maturing in this aspect, so my guess 
is that we'll start to see a lot more IPv6 over the next few years in 
mobile.

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