Who would dare to predict the year the internet will reach 50 billion addressable devices?

Thomas Noren, head of LTE product development at Ericsson sees one day 50 billion devices shouldered by LTE. He sees LTE as the truly global standard putting to rest the long and acrimonious rivalry between CDMA and GSM protagonists and even sees the Chinese third way with their TD-SCDMA aligned on LTE. Mobile Wimax is, in his mind, already relegated to the dustbin of history.

But whether or not it will all be riding on LTE, the 50 billion mark for addressable devices will be reached sooner rather than later. It goes without saying that to realize this vision, LTE needs IPv6. It was reassuring to see Verizon confirm their support for IPv6 and it would be great to see the other early movers such as our Canadian trio Bell, Rogers and Telus, our Nordic friends Teliasonera, Tele2 and Telenor not to forget our Japanese friends NTT Docomo and KDDI also voice their commitment. IPv6 is a minor aspect in the big LTE scheme of things but is essential for its success as a truly global and pervasive means of communications.

While some of the world’s leading LTE proponents and experts exchange notes at world summits and the WiMax Forum has very interesting summits of its own, other parts of the ecosystem are also conspiring to reach the 50 billion device milestone sooner rather than later. Foremost amongst them is the IPSO Alliance, their mission as indicated by the acronym is to make sure small objects with embedded IP can communicate between each other and those of other suppliers. The Alliance organized an interoperability demo at the Interop in Las Vegas in May. Sensors from a variety of suppliers located http://joinoneipworld.net/blog/wp-admin/post-new.phpon three continents, all addressable in IPv6, supplied over 100,000 readings on temperature, humidity etc. As stated in the press release, “Each node in the demonstration communicated using IPv6 directly between the sensor nodes without the use of proprietary protocols, gateways or translators.” It is easy to overlook the magnitude of this news and to what extent the gates to the true emergence and growth of the internet of things have been opened by this initiative.

It is safe to bet it will not take a decade to see 50 billion addressable things on the internet. These things are obviously devices as the Webster tells us that device means amongst other things: ‘a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function.’

As to whether all these device things will talk via LTE, that remains to be seen; what is sure though is that they’ll talk IPv6.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

As the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses continues to approach inexorably even the most diehard procrastinators start to emerge from their stupor and start to ask questions more frequently.

In order to respond to this growing interest the ITU has inaugurated a new website dedicated to the dissemination of IPv6 information which is most informative indeed and is worth some browsing through. It is accessible here.

Not to be outdone, RIPE, the European Regional Internet Registry (RIR) at its latest semi-annual meeting in Amsterdam announced also a new IPv6 informational website, accessible here.

The RIPE website also includes a telco and an equipment news category where the latest industry IPv6 news can be found and are worth a regular visit.

These sites are most useful complements to the veteran IPv6 information sites such as the IPv6 portal news site or the Go6 website hosted by Tata Communications in Montreal.

The Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T saw wireless networks about to drown under a deluge of data. To see Youtube content uploaded from an iPhone or Slingbox rerouting a favourite television program to your smart phone gives mobile network operators the shivers. Skype over 3G in the meantime gives sleepless nights, not because of surging megabyte floods but due to nightmares of considerable voice and roaming revenues washing away.

Not easy to plan and engineer “managed transitions” under those circumstances. Defensive moves such as punitive surcharges when the customer exceeds the rather meager number of megs most plans allow for, or forcing handset suppliers to block favourite applications, will not make you particularly popular with a young and demanding customer base who consider communication a fundamental right. Capacity increase is the obvious answer but requires investment. HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) was supposed to provide short to medium term relief to bandwidth stress while LTE would lead to the nirvana of unrestricted and presumably affordable wireless broadband access. In the meantime the villain of 3G and 4G protagonists remains mobile Wimax which could provide a viable alternative, opening their lucrative market to unwelcome newcomers.

Faced with deluges of data and floods of handsets and applications, a drought of IP addresses might seem trivial.

Over the last three years growing demand for mobile data has been met by rapid fire announcements and deployments of HSDPA and HSUPA and now of souped up versions like HSPA+. The only glitch was that this carefully planned evolutionary path did not anticipate the iPhone and the cohort of smartphones or the nascent Netbook phenomenon. Once again, a cocktail of creativity and new technology provided the proverbial discontinuity. Only possible answer: bring the Long Term nearer and deliver LTE now! Verizon, Teliasonera, NTT Docomo and other heavyweights now plan LTE deployment starting in 2010! As of May 27th thirty one operators are already committed and the race is on to gain a competitive advantage. Ten of them plan initial commercial deployment by end of next year!

‘IPv6 Transition Considerations for LTE and Evolved Packet Core’ is hardly the title for a novel to read on your next plane trip but time has come to go through this excellent white paper published in March by 3G Americas.

As their president, Chris Pearson, stated: “The time is now for the entire converged wireless ecosystem of operators, vendors and regulators to fully plan and implement IPv6 transition strategies to ensure our great industry continues to prosper” adding that as today’s four billion wireless subscribers transition to Internet-capable mobile devices, the need for IPv6 addresses becomes more apparent.

Well, time to act might come sooner than anticipated; while many remain unfazed by the imminent prospect of a severe drought of internet addresses, the very idea of drowning under a deluge of data is definitely not palatable. Mobile Network Operators need LTE. LTE needs IPv6. Ergo they need IPv6. Does the syllogism hold?

Maybe 3G Americas and GSMA should consider sending a friendly reminder to their constituents, as ARIN did to theirs last month. Some constituents are member of both and if they fear neither drought nor deluge, well…

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

One popular evolving technology is policy-based QoS. These types of technologies can ensure that time-sensitive services such as voice and video are prioritized above applications such as email, and that traffic from business-critical financial or inventory applications are routed ahead of Internet browsing. Network managers can even set different quality levels for internal and external voice communications or application specific quality parameters.

All applications could be largely divided under three categories,

• Requiring End 2 End Guaranteed delivery
• Differentiated delivery
• Best effort delivery

Video share, Voice may require guaranteed end 2 end bandwidth when the application is invoked, while e-mails and normal file transfers could be on best effort basis.

However, it is also possible to prioritize some type of file transfers against others in the same infrastructure, this differentiation could be determined by nature of application (like financial information), or commercial benefits of the application to the network resource manager.

Looking forward to an IPX-based service architecture, the ability to apply QoS routing to traffic will be a significant enabler for next-generation services.

New services have the potential to touch more than voice. Data, video, even monetary transactions could all come together to create next-gen service, and each type of information may need different levels of policy-based routing, based upon differing sensitivity to latencies.

In an One IP World, Carrier industry’s response in offering such flexibility to their customers, will be the one most important factor to lead the change in the legacy transport network services. Policy-based QoS plays a key role in enabling carriers to step-up to the new generation of services.