pment vendors as it does for fixed network equipment vendors - the support for IPv6 has been improved dramatically over the last few years. The network equipment, subscriber database solution, and network management solutions, are available with IPv6 support. The deployment in operators' networks has been painfully slow. Though, in the early days of IPv6, 3G deployment was thought to be the driver of IPv6 deployment, the mobile broadband operators have been slow in adopting the new Internet technology. However, it seems that even the cellular deployment is now gaining momentum. All major cellular operators are either busy deploying IPv6 in their networks, or are planning the deployment. The mobile handset operating systems, the cellular chipsets, and the mobile applications increasingly support IPv6, eliminating one major problem from the IPv6 transition in the mobile broadband market. It should be expected that the cellular community will be very busy with IPv6 in the coming few years. A major reason that this book was written was to help people joining, or already participating in, the IPv6 deployment activities to get up to speed quicker. Deploying IPv6 in 3GPP Networks 1.10 Chapter Summary In this chapter, we concentrated on giving an introduction to the Internet, Internet technology, address exhaustion, and the deployment status at the time this book was written. The Internet has been built on a set of principles, which are embedded in the technology and in the Internet itself. These principles are repeated in the following: packet switched networking; the end-to-end principle; layered architecture; Postel's robustness principle; and creative anarchy. The IP is the technology that builds the Internet. It provides an unreliable packet delivery service where the packet delivery is based on the destination IP address. Currently, two versions of IP exist: IPv4 and IPv6. The IPv4 is the protocol that is predominantly used in the Internet. However, IPv4 addresses have been mostly depleted, posing a risk to the gro