Korea begins commercialized LTE service based on IPv6 | Hacker News Reader

Korea begins commercialized LTE service based on IPv6

whowired.com

51 pointsk4jh21 comments

"IPv6 can generate more than 1 trillion addresses while the current IPv4 can 'only' generate 4.3 billion addresses."

From wikipedia: "The length of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, compared with 32 bits in IPv4.[5] The address space therefore has 2ˆ128 or approximately 3.4×10ˆ38 addresses. This would be about 100 addresses for every atom on the surface of the earth"

Technically 3.4×10ˆ38 is greater than 1 trillion, so the article is correct, but still... :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6

One important difference is with IPv4, you have CIDR, so you can utilize a much, much greater percentage of the 2^32 addresses than you can of the 2^128 IPv6 addresses, which, for the most part, has subnetworks that are /64 (you will never see a /70 IPv6 network).

I think what's much more interesting about IPv6 is the number of networks with "effectively" unlimited number of hosts that you can have on them.

We routinely have IPv6 networks that have 15-20,000 hosts on a single mesh subnet, and there is zero effort required to support that.

Trying to design a network that might have as few as handful or as many as 32,000 hosts on IPv4 subnet would be a nightmare I don't even want to consider - even taking into account the impossibility of network assignment, there is the lack of SLAAC - you end up having to rely on things like DHCP, which, while wonderful for small networks, turns out to be a pain in the butt when you have a combination of mobility and millions of nodes.

Would be interested to hear about the work you do. I read your profile, but do you have a blog or such where you discuss these sorts of technical problems?

I'm mostly an L3 guy who mixes up a little with L2 - but all on the deployment/Ops. The real magic is done by our Routing and MAC engineers who have been coxing the mesh technology along for the last 10 years.

What I'd love to hear from, is somebody who has deployed the Cisco CGR at scale with iTron using RPL and the archrock technology.

I was shocked when I saw Verizon wireless has ipv6. Do other mobile carriers use it too? I guess mobile should be easier to switch. There are lots of greater than 10 year old desktops, but not so much on the smart phone side.

T-Mobile in the US also gives out IPv6 addresses

Indeed. Here is a short piece on T-Mobile's IPv6 rollout.

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-stud...

Mobile providers have been switching for a while, not least because many of the providers are relatively new and hence have very little IPv4 address space, with a surprising number doing carrier-level NAT because they simply don't have the address space to do anything else.

According to Google [1], S. Korea has almost no IPv6 adoption at all. This will be a nice change.

In other news, I see Google traffic is peaking at 4.5%.

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

They have gigabit everywhere but they're using IE6 on IPv4. The future is not evenly distributed indeed.

I came were to say the same thing. Was not disappoint. :)

Probably because everyone who wants to do online shopping has to use an old version of IE due to government regulations and shitty ActiveX controls.

Am i correct to assume, most LTE phones will be new phones, and therefore very likely ( or all ) support IPv6.

So its better to have LTE to be completely based on IPv6 rather then relying on carrier NAT?

That is the approach Verizon and T-Mobila are taking. About 50% of traffic has to go through NAT64 but that's better than 100% and it decreases over time.

You need NAT in one form or another for the foreseeable future even if you have IPv6 at the last mile.

Sorry for my ignorance, but why is that?

Because most servers that a user might want to connect to only have IPv4 addresses.

South Korea always boasts a great deal of connectivity and fast internet speeds but much of the population is locked to a very insecure way of authenticating Korean users via SSN or ActiveX plugins for banking that led to majority of credit cards being compromised a year ago.

Lot of websites are blocked, porn and whatever South Korean government deems as threat to their "National Security". Replying to a thread on a North Korean site will get you a visit from the police, blog about smoking marijuana in Canada and get arrested, make a porn video in Canada and get arrested.

The population has to pretty much deal with having fast access to a limited web, that is less secure and stuck in 2001 designs. Even if it gets faster and faster, the underlying issue that information is not truly free in South Korea is something the government likes to keep everyone in the dark about.

> blog about smoking marijuana in Canada and get arrested

> make a porn video in Canada and get arrested

Could you provide some context to this? Are you saying that someone could be arrested in South Korea for (e.g.) creating a porn video while in Canada? Does this just apply to South Korean citizens[1], or everyone that ends up on South Korean soil?

[1] If so, it's not unprecedented for a country to punish its citizens for doing something that is legal elsewhere, but illegal in-country.

IANAL, but I'll be pretty surprised if a Canadian citizen gets arrested in South Korea for having made a porn video in Canada. (Unless he/she created a porn site with the explicit purpose of (illegally) selling porn to Korea. Also, assuming he/she is not also a citizen of South Korea.)

About marijuana, yes. Korea is still ass-tight about drug laws. (But again, I'll be really surprised if, say, a US citizen is arrested upon visiting Korea for having smoked marijuana in Denver.)

Edit: Also, the claim of censorship is real but overblown. It's not like they censor CNN, wikipedia, or whatever website that might contain information that doesn't portray the Korean government in a glowing light. The only time I found some website blocked was some rambling twitter account from NK (or maybe NK sympathizer), and I knew about that twitter account only because the fact that it was blocked became viral news. But then again, I'm not interested in porn, gore videos, warez, or North Korean news, so YMMV.

Thanks to our great leader.

(Wait. Not that Korea? ;-()

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