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Cellular routers

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johnd:

--- Quote from: SLOweather on March 14, 2011, 11:50:15 AM ---In the US, at least on Verizon, the cellular router gets a real, live public IP address.
--- End quote ---

Hmm, interesting. I think the same may be true in Australia/NZ.

Actually and to be more specific, the issue in the UK is not so much that it's impossible to get a (dynamic) public IP on a cellular router but that it depends on so many things that the only reliable solution is to get a service with a SIM that has a static IP. 'Things' include:

Which network you're using;

Whether you're interested in 100 SIMs (in which case you'll probably be talking to a more clueful corporate helpline) or just one (where you'll be lucky to hit a service agent who even understands a question about 'can it have a public IP address', let alone be able to give a useful answer). Actually this is the number one problem.

What network speed you're connecting to (ie is it GPRS/EDGE/3G) etc. With some networks it seems that the faster speeds connect to a more modern network architecture, ie 3G may give you a public IP, but if the network has fallen back to GPRS then it may be a NAT connection. (And bearing in mind that remote sites will often be in more rural areas with poorer cellular coverage) The unpredictability here obviously isn't helpful.

Which APN you have set. I have seen it said that if you specify one APN on a network (with a choice of APNs) then you'll get a public IP but otherwise it will be NAT.

And so on...

So you end up going the static IP route just to get some predictability of connection type. Hopefully it might be the case that as and when IPv6 penetrates the cellular networks then there will be public IP addresses for everyone, maybe even fixed IP addresses. But I guess that won't happen for a year or two yet.

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