Another LTE network turns up as IPv4-only

Thu Oct 11 06:45:43 UTC 2012

On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Tore Anderson wrote:

> So. With a green-field deployment, in their home market (supposed to be 
> the first of their tree-digit million subscribers world-wide to get all 
> the cool new tech), built on 3GPP specs that fully supports IPv6, 
> already proven to work by other pioneers (^5 VzW), for which there are 
> plenty of compatible devices (again, ^5 VzW), and plenty of compatible 
> content (^5 ISOC, et al.), four months after World IPv6 Launch (in which 
> they participated), and one month after their RIR ran out of IPv4 
> addresses...launching without IPv6 support was a perfectly natural and 
> sensible thing for them to do, it seems.

The problem I have seen is not to get IPv6/dual stack in LTE (this worked 
from day one), it's to get dual stack working in all the cases with bearer 
establishment and handover between 2G/3G and 4G.

2G/3G is "fully integrated" with each other, but LTE is still kind of 
separate, vendors are just now getting around to producing mobile core 
nodes that support all of them with a single node for each function.

Would you want to get IPv6 when you're in the LTE network but lose it when 
you were handed over to 2G/3G. My guess is not, so I believe providers 
will wait until that is really done.

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