[arin-discuss] urgency of IPv6

[George, Wes E IV [NTK]]

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Mittelstaedt [mailto:tedm at ipinc.net]
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 4:09 PM
To: George, Wes E IV [NTK]
Cc: Owen DeLong; arin-discuss at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-discuss] urgency of IPv6

Just out of curiosity, I put in http://www.sprintv6.net/ to my phone
and I got the:

"You have reached this site via IPv4.  Ask your Internet service
provider about IPv6"  message.  That's from Sprint's network so it
looks like Sprint itself has some "overzealous equipment in the path" ;-)
[[WEG]] Well, I had a feeling someone would call me out on the carpet about that. We have a bug in our [overzealous equipment] code that is creating some problems for protocol 41 traffic - actually found out about it because someone posted about it on NANOG, and I'm told it'll be fixed in the next release, but I don't know exactly when that'll be.
It is also quite possible that your phone isn't actually doing anything with its 6to4 address, but it's still configured. Depends on the phone, specific version of WM, etc. 6to4 breaks in so many different ways, most of them hard to troubleshoot and non-deterministic, so mostly it defaults to disabled to prevent problems.
This is better than the alternative, where your phone simply fails to load the page until the IPv6 times out and it falls back to IPv4.

> 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.

OK that part I don't understand.  Why didn't Sprint
and the rest of the major US carriers get together and flex their
muscles and tell the unnamed Korean or Chinese manufacturers who make
the CDMA chipsets that they had to modify the CDMA silicon to support
IPv6 years and years ago?

[[WEG]] It's actually a well-known company that supplies a lot of the CDMA chipsets (at least their design, don't know if they outsource the Fab). All I'll say about this is, as with everywhere else in the industry, IPv6 wasn't seen as must have nearly soon enough, and we're all paying the price now.


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