By Rajiv Asati, Ravi Shankar, Cisco
As Cable MSOs continue to exploit the fantastic opportunity with SP Wi-Fi and witness the exponential growth in their customer-base using the SP Wi-Fi services,hey will soon have to decide whether to use public IPv4 addressing or private IPv4 addressing for the Wi-Fi Subscriber Equipments (UEs) used by their customer-based before the customers can avail of any free/paid services offered by the MSOs. The reason is that most Cable MSOs have so far stuck with IPv4-only SP Wi-Fi designs/deployments, and most of them will run out of their public IPv4-address pools sooner or later (as soon as 2013-14 for some).
In this paper, we outline a strategy entailing IPv6 over SP Wi-Fi, discuss common challenges (that Cable MSOs face) with IPv6 in Wi-Fi and propose necessary solutions & technological evolutions for deploying IPv6 over SP Wi-Fi in Cable MSO network