T-Mobile’s path to IPv6 Only

It's interesting how his chart deflects somewhere around 80%, since at the 2017 Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit that's about where T-Mobile US (who probably have the highest penetration of IPv6-capable endpoints of any ISP) noted their transition started slowing drastically.[0] The main reasons are that the remaining devices are old (e.g. 3G phones), have limited capabilities/needs (e.g. embedded IoT devices which just need to phone home once in a while), or are using odd configurations (e.g. for some reason T-Mobile doesn't currently support IPv6 for tethering). Another good talk from that conference is about how Carrier Grade NATs are (amazingly) even worse in practice than they sound in theory[1]. During the Q&A portion one of the audience members points out that as technologies like CGN become required to provide IPv4 service it will cause the cost of supporting IPv4 to rise over time and naturally push ISPs to kill IPv4 as the use of v4 drops while the costs to support it do not. I can also recommend a short talk by Cloudflare about their experience serving IPv6 traffic[2] and another on the history and future of IPv6[3]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]

I'm not sure what you're referring to. Here's a dude from T-Mobile explaining how they have (in 2017) over ten million end-customer devices without any IPv4 addresses assigned: * [VIDEO] For reaching services that are IPv6 only they use(d) DNS64 (with and without 464XLAT).

> This should help address these types of issues so more devs can get onto iOS more easily without having to meet Apple's level of requirements. Well if an app developer does not ensure that their code works on a device that only has an IPv6 address they will be in for a big surprise: lots of mobile telcos only give out IPv6 addresses. Connecting to the IPv4 world is done via CG-NAT with the first few hops being IPv6-only. Here's a guy from T-Mobile presenting on it: * [VIDEO]

> I wonder when (or if) we will see new IPv6 only ISPs. If you have a mobile device on US T-Mobile you only get a IPv6 address on it: * [VIDEO] * [LINK] * [LINK] Any access to IPv4 is through a proxy.

> What's really interesting is how many of these "we fear change" IT people don't realize they're already using IPv6 on their phones every day, with a majority of the sites they visit. For example see the video "T-Mobile’s path to IPv6 Only": * [VIDEO]

"T-Mobile’s path to IPv6 Only": > For the past 10 years [US] T-Mobile has worked towards creating an IPv6 environment and we are now getting very close to our goal. Stephan presents learning on how to successfully enable IPv6-only using DNS64 with or without 464XLAT. He will do a live demo of the different IP interfaces on an Android handset. Finally, he will discuss and give some best practices on how to handle DNS, applications, and websites that are having issues with DNS64. * [VIDEO] Apple mandated that all app in the iOS/mobile App Store had to support working on IPv6-only networks: * [LINK] Perhaps they should to the same thing for the macOS App Store.

iPhones on T-Mobile do not use 464XLAT, they use native IPv6 only. Some system frameworks like URLSession can do the NAT64 translation of hard-coded IPv4 addresses but it still goes over IPv6. In the video linked above: [VIDEO]

> Anyone running v6 only and bridging to v4 on the edge? If you are on T-Mobile USA you are IPv6-only on your mobile device: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] Lots of folks are probably IPv6-only without realizing it.