Subject: E.164 in IPv6

From: Hossam Afifi <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 09:50:47 +0100

A draft for coding E.164 numbers in IPv6 addresses is available at:

     http://www.rennes.enst-bretagne.fr/~afifi/e164ipv6.asc

 It helps in mobile telephony to have only one identification.

 your comments are welcomed on that draft submitted to the IPng WG.

Hossam Afifi
Jim Bound
Laurent Toutain

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From: Dan Wing <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 11:48:31 -0800 (PST)

>  your comments are welcomed on that draft submitted to the IPng WG.

This seems like a layering violation to me.  IP addresses are for routing,
not for identifying or routing to E.164 endpoints.

Other issues:

Who "owns" and who will delegate the various country-codes necessary for
this scheme to work?  The answer appears to be related to the current
problem the Internet is having with TLDs.

How does this work with number portability?  In the US, an E.164 number
could move to a different CLEC which would then require a routing table
exception be made for that E.164 number -- and after a few years the
routing tables would lose a lot of their aggregation, no?

And, as is obvious from the name of the I-D, this scheme doesn't work with
IPv4, which is a concern as almost all networks are still running "legacy"
IPv4.

-Dan Wing

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From: Laurent Toutain <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:47:18 -0600

> not for identifying or routing to E.164 endpoints.

I aggree with you, but the goal is to use these addresses when the routing can
be done at the layer two. For example when you use a mobile phone or a pager,
it's the operator network that knows how to reach you. That's why we propose
the IPv6/E.164 addresses. It ease the management of the adresses for those
equipment, but you cannot use them if you don't have this kind of routing at
layer 2.

> problem the Internet is having with TLDs.

it's the  telco problem, I don't know if we can have a country code for
Internet. This was a
proposal of the ETSI's TIPHON working group which works on IP telephony, but
if I have  good information, this was refused by the ITU.

> routing tables would lose a lot of their aggregation, no?

the same answer, we don't change the telephone network, we just give simple
identifier to mobile equipments

> IPv4, which is a concern as almost all networks are still running "legacy"

when you use IPv4 addresses it is more complex, you have to manage a mapping
between E.164 and
IPv4 addresses. With IPv6 it's easier, we think it'a a good point to put
IPv6-only stack in mobile equipment. During the transition period, the
interconnection with IPv4 network can be done by header translation at the
telco interconnection point.

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