Minutes of the 2012-05-30 IAB Teleconference (Techchat)

1. Attendance

PRESENT

• Jari Arkko
• Mary Barnes (IAB Executive Director)
• Marc Blanchet
• Ross Callon
• Alissa Cooper
• Spencer Dawkins
• Joel Halpern
• David Kessens
• Danny McPherson
• Robert Sparks (IESG Liaison)
• Dave Thaler
• Hannes Tschofenig

APOLOGIES

• Bernard Aboba (IAB Chair)
• Lars Eggert (IRTF Chair)
• Mat Ford (ISOC Liaison)
• Russ Housley (IETF Chair)
• Cindy Morgan (IAB Executive Assistant)
• Jon Peterson

GUEST

• Cameron Byrne

2. Tech chat: T-mobile’s IPv6 Deployment

Cameron Byrne delivered a presentation on “T-Mobile USA IPv6 Deployment: IPv6-only Mobile Perspective.”

Cameron noted that it is difficult to push requirements on handset manufacturers, and therefore difficult to get IPv6 support on handsets, even when the requirements are clearly identified. IPv6 is easy to deploy for 3G/LTE because all of the packets are tunneled, and therefore the touch points are the handsets and the GGSN; the rest of the core is untouched.

Currently, networks have to engineer for IPv4-only, IPv6-only and dual-stack users and services. Dual-stack will be deployed for LTE, but this does not help the address exhaustion problem. In LTE, dual stack becomes cheaper than in 3g since there is the new concept of 1 bearer that does v4 and v6. Costs are based on the ports and contexts, rather than on the number of boxes.

Billing records can be made IPv6-enabled with a Perl hack that maps a 128 bit IPv6 address into an arbitrary 32 bit identifier; fully converting billing systems to IPv6 would require millions of dollars for the upgrade.

RFC 1918, “Address Allocation for Private Internets,” was not widely used in the early smartphone deployments with end-to-end connectivity/IMS/handset-to-handset RTP-direction communication. T-Mobile had to renumber its network.

Many smartphone applications either use IPv4 literals or a low-level API with IPv4-only socket calls. IPv4 literals are a bad practice, as they break things for shared customers. Smartphones may have 30 simultaneous connections open for updates and notifications, even when the phone is not being used. Content, applications, and services will be better served via end-to-end IPv6, not NAT44 or NAT64. NAT64 will sunset by itself as more IPv6 destinations are available; NAT44 will never sunset itself.

The board discussed support for law enforcement requests on IPv6 networks. Cameron noted that Tmobile does not keep user activity logs unless there is a wiretap warrant that specifies a Tmobile customer. A question was raised with regards to the permanence of IPv6 addresses; Cameron noted that they are ephemeral and that a specific address usually only lasts about 8 hours.

3. Other Business

Mary asked the board to populate the IETF 84 meeting page on the wiki with Program meetings.

Hannes requested that IAB meeting agendas include more time for open discussions, as opposed to concentrating on Program reviews. Mary took an action to work with Bernard on revising the agenda to consider this input.