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back to article Smartphones set fair to OUTNUMBER HUMANS - Ericsson

The growth in smartphone devices has now overtaken that of conventional handsets, accounting for 55 per cent of new mobile subscriptions in the first nine months of 2013. That's according to a new study by telecoms hardware maker Ericsson. Overall globally, the Swedish multinational reckons there were 4.5 billion people …

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  1. btrower

    Well that is going to be a headache using IPv4

    Thus far, especially in Canada, companies are dragging their feet implementing IPv6. Witness this unfortunate thread where:

    1) My ISP has not and perhaps cannot implement IPv6

    2) It would appear that my ISP and others besides do not realize there is a problem.

    http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28767890-INTERNET-When-will-IPV6-be-available-on-Cogeco-2-

    I want to keep this simple: IPv4 does not have a large enough address space to dish out IP addresses to 4.5 billion devices.

    I do not want to go into it, but anyone with reasonable knowledge of this knows that existing 'solutions' are temporary kludges that lead to nasty stuff like walled gardens, broken security, compromised privacy, network congestion and relay delays, etc. If IPv4 and its kludges could somehow be OK, nobody would have even tried to embrace a disastrous solution like IPv6. It is hard, BTW to mount a defence of IPv6. The marketplace has clearly spoken that despite a clear need and a 15 year implementation window, IPv6 was so poor a solution that it has not been entirely implemented.

    We have used horrendous hacks like NAT for so long that people have begun to think they aren't hacks. In fact, we have effectively run out of IPv4 addresses for any practical purpose.

    IPv6 is just an absolutely awful solution to a problem the designers did not properly understand. Had it been the correct incremental expansion to IPv4, we would all be in a much larger address space already.

    Here is something awful to contemplate: Authoritarian types such as law enforcement people do not like the fact that IPv4 is much easier to trace than IPv6. What is a problem in IPv4 is a 'feature' for them. This may not have actively interfered with roll-out of IPv6, but it sure did not help.

    So much of this and similar stuff is such a wacky mess that it is hard to know where to start fixing it. Whatever the case, we should all demand better.

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    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
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      Re: Well that is going to be a headache using IPv4

      I want to keep this simple: IPv4 does not have a large enough address space to dish out IP addresses to 4.5 billion devices.

      Well, yes but IP addresses are not distributed evenly, are there. I suspect that Canada, like the US has more than enough IPv4 addresses for the for near future. Meanwhile, Asia has run out several times over and Europe technically now has as well.

      Of course, the longer providers drag their feet on the implementation of IPv6, the less well able they will be to deal with it when they have to and the less influence they will have on its future development. Hm, given the recent performance of the NSA that might not be such a bad thing! ;-)

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      1. btrower
        Reply Icon

        Re: Well that is going to be a headache using IPv4

        @Charlie Clark:

        What you say is true. However, even where we have not exhausted them, we still have NAT behind everything all over the place and this creates problems that IPv6 was expected to solve. There are other issues with IPv4 that are (sometimes badly) addressed by IPv6.

        I do not think we will be able to live indefinitely in a little oasis of IPv4 addresses when others are forced to use IPv6 or sit behind walled gardens.

        I feel weird promoting IPv6 because I find it detestable. However, the plain fact of the matter is that the IPv4 address space is too small to allow the world's devices to talk IP to IP directly.

        For what it is worth, the main things about IPv6 that bug me are:

        1) It was not a proper extension to IPv4 and that is why, like the Itanic, it is a still-born zombie.

        2) It solved the problem of too small a limit with a larger limit rather than removing limits. This has happened over and over and over in this industry. We never learn.

        3) It is not deployed universally enough to use and implementations have issues.

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  2. hammarbtyp

    Maybe right, but probably not yet

    They maybe right, but Ericsson's predictive capabilities has never been it's strong point.

    When I worked for them I remember being bused down to a posh hotel in Brighton where we watched lots of video's of people happily video phoning each other (using Ericsson handsets of course) and explaining how data was going to go through the roof and how Ericsson was best placed to take advantage of the situation (we also had to sit through the worst corporate rap video ever).

    Which sounds good, however this was in 2002 and the mobile revolution took a lot longer to arrive than they predicted and in between Ericsson had to go through a prolonged period of contraction and of course Ericsson branded mobiles are consigned to product history.

    So they may be right but don't expect it to happen in the timescales suggested.

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    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
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      Re: Maybe right, but probably not yet

      Video calls never took off for two reasons: they are prohibitively expensive; it's inconvenient and uncomfortable to stay still and stare at a camera. This was never going to drive data use. 3G also had to compete with the usual problems of needing handsets powerful enough to use it and prices that could compete with the increasingly ubiquitous WiFi. To do that they had to swallow their pride and write down the

      value of the spectrum licences they'd paid stupid money more.

      Now, all new networks deployments can take advantage of a much more homogenous (IP-based) environment, making it much easier to offer data at marketable prices. So, even in developing countries, there is a huge market for mobile data but it won't be at 2003 European or 2013 American prices. Value-added OTT services are probably the key enablers.

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  3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    Proofreading required

    Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis contends out that…

    What does "contending out" mean?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Proofreading required

      For that matter, what does "Smartphones set fair to OUTNUMBER HUMANS" mean?

      Why not just "Smartphones will OUTNUMBER HUMANS"?

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