Significant Technical, Business Model Changes Needed to Spur Mobile IPv6 Take-Up
Transition from Internet Protocol version 4 to IPv6 on mobile networks is lagging because operators don’t see any immediate benefits in the new addressing technology, WirelessE2E LLC founder Murat Bilgic told us. The shift involves major “back-office,” business objective and technological upgrades in the face of customer apathy, he said. Mobile IPv6 could offer services better to consumers if operators made the effort, said WiChorus Technical Fellow Charles Perkins, a co-inventor of the technology.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
One unnamed U.K. operator building up to trialing mobile IPv6 has run into technical delays, The Register reported last month. Rivals haven’t figured out why they should bother, it said. Interest is lagging because IPv4 now links IP addresses to billing records and content filtering systems, making the shift to IPv6 more complicated, it said. Carriers declined to comment for this article.
Billing issues will arise because network operators’ back-office systems are designed only to give IPv4 to customers, said Bilgic, a consultant on mobile IPv6 and other wireless connectivity issues. When those systems allocate addresses, they also take care of the “policy” governing which services each customer receives based on his IP address, be it unrestricted or restricted Internet surfing or differentiated offerings, he said. Operators rely on IP addresses to determine what to do with each customer, and all these systems must be upgraded to IPv6, he said.
The switch will be complicated, Bilgic said. Mobile providers must decide what their business needs and objectives are, he said. Many are considering machine-to-machine services, so they will have to move to IPv6 rather than using network address translation (NAT), he said. Cisco defines NAT as a process that allows a single device, such as a router, to act as agent between the public Internet and a local or private network, letting one IP address represent a whole group of computers to anything outside their network.
Mobile operators must also identify which services they want to offer on their networks, in IPv6 and well as IPv4, Bilgic said. Then there are the technical aspects of the switch: The “packet core network”; policy control mechanism; management of IP address allocation to customers; routing and switching network; and security components must all be updated, he said. Customer care systems also need changing to allow operators to see users’ current IP addresses, he said.
For carriers, selling IPv6 as a service is “rather impossible” because consumers don’t want to pay, Bilgic said. He “guestimated” a one time capital expense of $1.00-$1.50 per subscriber. On the other hand, he said the cost of managing NAT is rising, and one possible new business model could be to give customers IPv6 addresses along with some favorable usage term limits or other goodies to nudge them toward the new technology. Though primarily a cost-reduction strategy, this will prepare operators’ networks for the future, he said.
Complaints about IPv6 being pointless “require a studied disregard for the well-known advantages that IPv6 can provide,” said Perkins. IPv4 has three main functions, he said: Routing based on the common bit-prefix of a “network of hosts” instead of on the IP address of individual hosts; distinguishing each IPv4 device (node) from all others; and best effort service -- ensuring all data packets are transmitted first-in/first-out, he said. IPv6 adds mobility and auto-configuration, and enables mobility management by mandating that all nodes use IP security, something IPv4 can’t do, he said.
Operators make practically no use of any of those functions of IPv4 or IPv6, relegating the technology to a simple registry for a flat numbering space, Perkins said. Claims that networks are becoming “all-IP” purposefully ignore the fact that even after 15 years of standards efforts to “integrate” IP into radio access networks, “there still has been little effort to use it as designed,” he said.
Why don’t operators make better use of IPv4 and IPv6? Perkins’ guess is that they “have not had good leadership” from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, which unites telecommunications standards bodies, on the matter. Since Internet services are often available at little or no expense, operators have wanted to emphasize other services that can provide more revenue, such as text messaging, he said. That can be done for free over the Internet, but mobile providers make a lot of money by charging per message, he said. Operators want to be more than just a “bit pipe,” he said. IPv6 is a “strategy which prepares the operator for the long term” with no significant benefits in the short term, said Bilgic.
But moving to IPv6 could give users better services, Perkins said. It could be a “big plus” for peer-to-peer services, chats, VoIP, microservices and others, he said. If operators don’t want to encourage those applications, users won’t see much direct benefit from IPv6, he said. “Put another way, the constraints of IPv4 can be used to justify operators’ claims that their customers ‘need’ the operators’ ’services.'”