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IETF's Tips For Network Admins On How To Avoid Draining Smartphone Batteries (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Two engineers from Cisco and Google have raised the problem of IPv6 networks that drain smartphone battery life and issued a series of tips for other network admins on why and how to properly configure their networks. The problem is because of Router Advertisements (RAs). These are periodic messages sent by the router to all network clients telling them its IPv6 address, at which it can be reached. Apparently some networks are sending these as often as every 3 seconds, while the engineers say the proper interval should be 7 per hour. Hence the reason why your battery life is often drained even if your phone is in sleep mode, but connected to a local network.
The Bad:
-They did away with private addressing (site-local) "because it breaks the openness of the internet and firewalls". Tell that one to someone who's seen hackers use a Java-based PS2 Video broadcasting software to send files across the internet. Lets automatically use public addresses on air-gapped networks.
-The standard has changed so many times in the last 10 years nobody can comprehend it; every book has a different set of material on it, every programmer has set their infrastructure up differently.
-They did away with IPV4's simplistic subnetting and supernetting, and introduced EUI-64 addressing which can track devices as they move from network to network. Marketing companies like Google and Microsoft were helping to write the standard.
-Very Few large deployments.
The Good: /22 block (1024 addresses). IPv6 breaks that mold.
-Better for networks with large numbers of hosts: Usually you don't make a broadcast domain any larger than a
-Great for multicast\anycast traffic.
-Great for creating complex and elegant networks when combined with VLAN's; 802.1x plus NAC plus EUI64 plus asset tagging has the promise to be really effective for physical port security in said large companies.