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Apple to iOS devs: IPv6-only cell service is coming soon, get your apps ready

7 points by saidajigumi 11y ago

saidajigumi 11y ago
There's a particularly interesting bit about changes coming with cellular providers in this article, down at the "What's actually happening" heading. A snippet: [...] Lakhera referred to the fact that there are pretty much no IPv4 addresses left and that the big cellular carriers really don't want to continue running IPv4 and IPv6 side by side in dual stack configuration—apparently, IPv6-only cellular service is coming. Soon. The way Apple is addressing that situation is to make sure that all iOS apps support IPv6. However, many servers are still IPv4-only. To reach those, the cellular networks are going to deploy NAT64 translators. NAT64 allows IPv6 applications to access IPv4 servers. Without these translators, IPv6 applications ask the DNS for IPv6 addresses to connect to, but obviously IPv4-only servers don't have IPv6 addresses, so a regular DNS server then returns an empty list of IPv6 addresses, leaving the application all dressed up with nowhere to go. A DNS64 server, on the other hand, creates a "synthetic" IPv6 address that the application can use. The packets sent to those addresses end up at the NAT64 translator, which recovers the IPv4 address of the intended destination using the IPv6 address created by the DNS64 and translates the packet from IPv6 to IPv4. [...]
- p1mrx 11y ago
  IPv6-only + NAT64 networks aren't coming "soon"; T-Mobile has been operating this configuration on non-Apple devices for the last 1-2 years: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-study-t-mobile-us-goes-ipv6-only-using-464xlat/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-stud... Android (and more recently, Windows Phone) uses 464XLAT to keep the AF_INET socket APIs on life support. Apple didn't like that design, so instead they're telling app developers to fix their code. It remains to be seen whether Apple's iron fist can weed out the IPv4-only apps well enough to satisfy the carriers, or if they'll backpedal and implement a broader compatibility hack.

7 points by saidajigumi 11y ago

There's a particularly interesting bit about changes coming with cellular providers in this article, down at the "What's actually happening" heading. A snippet: [...] Lakhera referred to the fact that there are pretty much no IPv4 addresses left and that the big cellular carriers really don't want to continue running IPv4 and IPv6 side by side in dual stack configuration—apparently, IPv6-only cellular service is coming. Soon. The way Apple is addressing that situation is to make sure that all iOS apps support IPv6. However, many servers are still IPv4-only. To reach those, the cellular networks are going to deploy NAT64 translators. NAT64 allows IPv6 applications to access IPv4 servers. Without these translators, IPv6 applications ask the DNS for IPv6 addresses to connect to, but obviously IPv4-only servers don't have IPv6 addresses, so a regular DNS server then returns an empty list of IPv6 addresses, leaving the application all dressed up with nowhere to go. A DNS64 server, on the other hand, creates a "synthetic" IPv6 address that the application can use. The packets sent to those addresses end up at the NAT64 translator, which recovers the IPv4 address of the intended destination using the IPv6 address created by the DNS64 and translates the packet from IPv6 to IPv4. [...]

p1mrx 11y ago
IPv6-only + NAT64 networks aren't coming "soon"; T-Mobile has been operating this configuration on non-Apple devices for the last 1-2 years: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-study-t-mobile-us-goes-ipv6-only-using-464xlat/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-stud... Android (and more recently, Windows Phone) uses 464XLAT to keep the AF_INET socket APIs on life support. Apple didn't like that design, so instead they're telling app developers to fix their code. It remains to be seen whether Apple's iron fist can weed out the IPv4-only apps well enough to satisfy the carriers, or if they'll backpedal and implement a broader compatibility hack.