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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

What do we have IPv6 for? I thought these 4G/5G networks run a TCP stack and telephony on top of it. Why do we phone numbers for device to device communication?

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> Why do we phone numbers for device to device communication?

For billing, mainly.

The phone number in 3GPP protocols is the IMSI = international mobile subscriber identity, which identifies a user on the phone network. You swap out your SIM card, and you swap out your IMSI. You roam abroad, and the foreign network knows who to send the bill to.

The alternative would be to keep an international database of IMEIs (device IDs) like CDMA networks did. Using SIM cards with IMSIs ended up being more consumer-friendly.

Probably the most accurate of all reasons for lack of options

Give me a call at [2607:f8b0:4004:802::200e] and I'll tell you.

Only robots make phone calls now.

I think this is an underrated comment. I think 99% of my phone calls now are robo-calls or organizations I've done some transaction with calling. Very few (1% or less) of my phone calls are like friends and family--other mediums just took those over completely.

In the grim future, you'll have a bot that can talk to your family and friends, like this with text to speech, using your voice:

https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...

I completely agree but the consideration is your phone is dead and you need to get ahold of someone. You should be able to easily memorize some way to contact emergency contacts IMO.

Give me a call at metrix.afraid.org instead.

You could encode the addresses as 24 letters and numbers (a to z, case insensitive) but I'd say dns is probably a better solution.

That's "8kEUuBoURjsxZ" in Base56.

Or using the PGP wordlist, "bookshelf amusement Vulcan phonetic crackdown alkali merit candidate aardvark Atlantic"

So obviously that's not going to work! But IPv6 isn't meant to be a static identifier. We have DNS for that.

I do think there's a future where the concept of "phone number" no longer exists. But this isn't it.

EDIT: Made it clear I agree with lemcoe9 that this doesn't work.

Good luck with that. Numbers are easier to pronounce/use/enter. Not everyone uses latin.

> "bookshelf amusement Vulcan phonetic crackdown alkali merit candidate aardvark Atlantic"

Make some chinese, japanese, russians to pronounce this on daily base.

EDIT: __aardvark__ had to google this one.

You know someone is going to reserve "Longing, rusted, furnace, daybreak, seventeen, benign, nine, homecoming, one, freight car"

A phone number is just an entry in my phone's address book - I don't think I dial them by hand any more often than I type an IP address by hand.

Exactly. I don't know my moms phone number. Or my sons. Or any friends or colleagues. The only phone number I remember is my childhood home phone number that was drilled into me 35 years ago, and my own number.

The last (originally a) land line phone number I had memorized in childhood was quietly lost last year when my grandmother passed away. That personally seemed to mark the end of the era where I'd ever remember a phone number that wasn't one I punch into random "rewards programs" kiosks as an ID of sorts.

There are exactly 6 phone numbers I can recall from memory, one of them is my grandfathers which I’ve known since I was little, the others are family members on my phone plan because we got assigned a block of contiguous numbers when we switched to T-Mobile.

I type ip addresses by hand a dozen times a day, at least.

For the same reason we have DNS.

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