[arin-discuss] urgency of IPv6

David Farmer farmer at umn.edu
Tue Jun 29 10:29:44 EDT 2010


George, Wes E IV [NTK] wrote:
> [[WEG]] I can say with absolute certainty that we (sprint) *are* giving you an IPv4 address and are *not* giving you an IPv6 address systematically. However, there are several asterisks to that statement.
> First, many (not necessarily all) WM phones have 6to4 (RFC3068) enabled. This means that if they get a routable IPv4 address, they'll generate their own IPv6 address. It'll be in the 2002::/16 range. This means that in theory they are doing IPv6, but they are beholden to the relatively broken set of 6to4 relays and asymmetric routing that this brings, not to mention any overzealous equipment in the path that blocks protocol 41, and it will only be used to connect to IPv6-enabled websites, not as a translation for IPv4.
> Second, both the iPhone and Android have support for IPv6 in the OS -- on WiFi. If you connect it to an IPv6-enabled network, it will get an address, and theoretically will talk to IPv6-capable devices via IPv6. I don't have access to a WM phone with WiFi to determine if it does the same. It probably depends on the version.
> http://www.personal.psu.edu/dvm105/blogs/ipv6/2010/05/ipv6-on-smartphones---its-happ.html

Windows Mobile supports IPv6 (SLAAC only), and has supposedly all the 
way back to Windows CE 4.1.  The last three WM (5.1, 6.1, 6.5) devices 
I've tried IPv6 on have basically worked over WIFI. However, since it 
only does SLAAC and there is usually no way to enter a IPv6 DNS server, 
or IPv4 DNS server for that matter, it is probably limited to 
functioning on Dual Stack WIFI networks. I believe it can only learn a 
DNS server via IPv4 DHCP and use it for all DNS lookups.

I believe the WM/WinCE IPv6 stack was derived from the Win XP IPv6 stack 
and has similar limitations, but that is supposition on my part.

> However, they do NOT do this over the 3G interface, at least not yet. Without getting into too much special sauce, on CDMA it's a chipset issue more than a software issue, so it's not always as simple as pushing a software update to phones to make it work.

-- 
===============================================
David Farmer               Email:farmer at umn.edu
Networking & Telecommunication Services
Office of Information Technology
University of Minnesota	
2218 University Ave SE	    Phone: 612-626-0815
Minneapolis, MN 55414-3029   Cell: 612-812-9952
===============================================



More information about the ARIN-discuss mailing list