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What makes it a better transition method than operator-level NAT for IPv4 (and no NAT for IPv6)? Like, what do you gain by having the client not ever speak IPv4 directly?

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It's less ugly than Dual Stack. Just one address per device, nothing more. This should be the long term goal too.

Indeed. Also, in 3GPP until Release 9 there had to be two PDP contexts per device - one for IPv4 and one for IPv6, thus resulting in performance issues, and licensing costs for some vendors too. This was fixed in later releases when a new type was added, IPv4v6, which combined both stacks within a single context, but I heard this created issues with roaming if the "guest" operator network did not support this context type.

But indeed just one address family is less overhead, and less work for the device. Thus, potentially better battery life.

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