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No IPv6 For UK Broadband Users
Journal written by farnz (625056) and posted by
timothy
on Thu Oct 09, 2008 12:19 PM
from the not-now-love-not-now dept.
from the not-now-love-not-now dept.
BT (the incumbent telephone company in the United Kingdom) are in the process of spending millions of pounds on upgrading their network to an all-IP core. However, they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support, preferring to insist that IPv4 is enough for everyone. Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?
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2^32 ips (Score:3, Funny)
ought to be enough for anybody
Re:2^32 ips (Score:5, Insightful)
But not enough for everybody.
Parent
Re:2^32 ips (Score:5, Funny)
Oh come on, we've got enough for another 2 or 3 years. Who knows what could happen in that time! Global Warming disasters, World War III, you name it! A couple minor setbacks like those, and we could stretch IP4 for another century! They obviously just know something we don't...
Parent
hey don't worry man (Score:5, Funny)
They'll just NAT the world.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They'll just NAT the world.
I hope I get to share an IP with an RIAA executive.
Sounds about right (Score:4, Informative)
Upgrading "to an all-IP core" (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I rang my (otherwise extremely good, if a little more expensive than most) ISP, Zen [zen.co.uk], and asked for v6. They said they didn't do it, as not enough people had asked for it. I asked if they'd make a note of my request - they said they would.
I offered to run an IPv6 tunnel router for them, if they'd stick it in their network, and hook it up to a v6 feed somewhere. They declined.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Various synchronous protocols which are not IT related at all. Before the migration to IP, telecoms networks were completely different from networking ptotocols and woild never be seen inside a computer. They were based on a digital equivalent of the original analog system ogf connecting together a lot of ire pairs, so a a single conductor led from one end to the other. Teleom protocols created a logical conductor consisting of reserved bits in packets into which your data was fitted. Call setup required re
Internet in the UK will fall over... (Score:5, Insightful)
BT is too busy selling everyone's personal info and browsing habits to notice that in a few years their customers wont be able to do anything on t'internet because of a lack of IPv6.
It'll give them a good excuse to jack up prices because their 21CN (21st Century Network) is about as efficient as 1st century roman plumbing and is unable to handle current traffic let alone allow for any growth.
Re:Internet in the UK will fall over... (Score:4, Funny)
Did you know? First century Roman plumbing was actually...surprisingly efficient!
Those Romans brought it to your uncivilized land of drunken fog-priests, and you insult them like that. And I thought British people had a heightened sense of shame!
Parent
Re:Internet in the UK will fall over... (Score:5, Funny)
But aside from that, what did the Romans ever do for them?
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Re:Internet in the UK will fall over... (Score:4, Informative)
I take it that you have never seen any actual Roman plumbing then?
Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.
Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.
Thirdly there was a great deal of corruption. The amount you paid for your water depended on the diameter of the pipe coming into your property. However it was common place to bribe the local water inspector to fit a larger pipe than it said on the records.
Yes it was another 1400 years after the Romans left before plumbing became widespread again in Great Britain. However that does not mean that the Roman plumbing was some paragon of efficiency.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.
Rain in mountains + aqueduct + gravity = 24/7 water supply. Waste? So what?
Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.
Hard mountain water quickly generates a coating of lime in the pipes. Lead? No problem
Thirdly there was a great deal of corruption. The amount you paid for your water depended on the diameter of the pipe coming into your property. However it was common place to bribe the local water inspector to fit a larger pipe than it said on the records.
Normal bureaucratic graft here. I cannot imagine any sufficiently civilized society without it.
In short, the Romans were not backwards. I've seen (and used) plenty of Roman plumbing. Did you know that the city's system still employs some of the (admittedly refurbished) lines? Best tap water I've ever tasted.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not having a tap was not that great a problem for them. Don't forget that the number of people back then was a tiny fraction of the number we have now. Most probably they were tapping natural springs and just diverting the water into a pipe. It would have been flowing away either way. Also, without chlorination you really don't want sitting water as it will gather all manner of "bad things".
There is a lot of rubbish talked about lead piping. The actual danger of lead piping is minimal to non-existant. Lead
The border routers (Score:5, Funny)
Well I'm sure that we can address at border routers with the UK. Since they have to switch all of the bits from the left side to the right side of the tubes, they might as well do 6to4 as well.
Re:The border routers (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Not all users though (Score:5, Informative)
The summary clearly fails to realise that not all broadband in the UK goes through BT's network. Virgin Media offers cable broadband through fibre optic. Don't know what their take on IPv6 is though.
Yet more FUD?
Re:Not all users though (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Not all users though (Score:4, Interesting)
Although I'm not sure about the claim about not running fibre to the kerb.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
note: I'm reffering to virgin media cable here, virgin media also do a service using BT wholesale ADSL which by all accounts is shit (the samknows report uses "virgin media" to reffer to the cable service and "virgin.net" to reffer to the ADSL service).
Umm most of the graphs are smaller is better and virgin medias line tends to be near the bottom. They do worst in the voip test but not so badly that it is likely to cause pracitcal issues. They do badly in the "current speed relative to max speed" tests but
Re:Not all users though (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on your region. I use Virgin Media, and there's fibre right up to my front door. Their customer service, historically terrible in the NTL days, has actually got a bit better lately too.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
BT wholesale provide the underlying infrastructure, and then third party ISPs, or other divisions within BT, provide the IP level connectivity...
It's possible to get native IPv6 connectivity today through several ISPs in the UK, tho it's not really an advertised service because very few people are looking for it...
http://www.goscomb.net/ [goscomb.net]
http://www.nitrex.net/ [nitrex.net]
Incidentally, BT themselves used to offer an ipv6 tunnel broker service, so they clearly have some ipv6 capability.
Re:Not all users though (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes the article is FUD ... My provider uses BT ADSL and also supplies IPv6 if you ask for it.
The fact is that BT ADSL just supplies a pipe to the ISP (implemented originally using Frame Relay but with the 21CN project as a tunnel over IP) and it's up to the ISP to implement IPv4, IPv6, Chaosnet, carrier pigeon or whatever they want.
Rich.
Unwillingness to learn something new? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find a disturbing unwillingness to learn in the IT world.
I too am guilty of being reluctant to deploy technologies I don't fully understand...IPv6 being one of them. (I am told it isn't THAT big a deal but still... I don't know it and I know IPv4) And it is my guess that just as many IT groups want to solve problems with MS Windows (because that's all they know) BT probably wants to solve their problems with IPv4.
Re:Unwillingness to learn something new? (Score:4, Insightful)
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BT (Score:2)
BT ... can one expect anything useful of them??
Have now been living 1 year here in this country and my experience with this company are enough for me (I have only a fixed line from them which I need to get internet from another ISP).
Stop whining, (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure everyone is going to see that your IP address is 10.x.x.x soon. Enjoy the big NAT box in the sky. And I wish you luck getting your ports forwarded.
What BT Stands For (Score:5, Funny)
Overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?
It seems IPv4 exhaustion is the new Y2K. Lots of reports, few problems.
IPv6 is a dud (maybe) (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a small but growing number of folks who think IPv6 may be stillborn. The rationale goes something like this:
1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.
2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.
3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which does solve that problem will leapfrog IPv6's deployment.
4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.
Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe) (Score:4, Insightful)
1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.
Waaah Waaah! We cheaped out during our last hardware upgrade cycle so we'd have to upgrade everything this time around! Waaah!
2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.
True, this is partly because a lot of ISPs will simply say NO to customers asking about IPv6. The ISP I'm using at home basically told me they are officially "testing" IPv6 for residential users but that this testing is very very limited and that business customers who want IPv6 get to pay extra for it. So I'm using a Sixxs tunnel for now.
3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which does solve that problem will leapfrog IPv6's deployment.
The main problem IPv6 is supposed to solve is the same problem that the original IP protocol was supposed to solve, the lack of end-to-end addressing on the internet.
4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.
NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds. If you think this isn't so then you need to get your head out of the sand/your ass (your choice) and pay better attention.
/Mikael
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but the pretty thing is that we are the ones suffering the problems caused by NAT, and spending on the workarounds. But the ISPs are the one economizing at the IPv6 migration.
You can arguee until the end of time that on a competitive environment, if the consumers want, somebody will supply them. But that doesn't make the broadband market competitive.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's exactly the non-brokenness of IPv6 in this regard that makes some people think twice about it. NAT is perfect for consumers, because you can't have *servers* strewn about every household with it, while you can perfectly consume (as you should). With IPv6 you can have every device having its own (even static) IP and as such can have it act as a reliably reachable server. This thought is a
Breaking the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
You have succinctly summed up the opinion of most of the network-engineer types that I have spoken to on the subject. Especially the part about "breaking the Internet" -- that's a very familiar refrain.
And you know what? You're probably right, in a hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky network engineer's world. But the rest of us have already accepted the fact that, as with so many other things in life, we're going to have to put up with what we get. I don't own an ISP. You don't own an ISP. So what are we going to do? Write letters? Threaten to take our business -- where? To the ISP down the block? Which has the exact same policies as the one I subscribe to now?
Telling the major telcos that they need to convert their entire infrastructures to IPv6 is like telling America it needs to switch to the metric system. Again, quite astute -- so where are we on that? The engineers have pretty much gone over to metric, but the rest of us are still counting rods to the hog's-head. Think it's going to change?
It takes force to overcome inertia. The more inertia, the more force to overcome it. In this case, the "force" is going to have to be a market force. Until the telcos see a real problem with IPv4 -- a business problem, such as being unable to reach new customers, or their services not being perceived as competitive -- they won't change. Network engineers are demanding change, but they aren't offering any reasons -- not reasons of the type that businesses understand.
And not the type of reasons that customers understand, either. I get my email, I get my Web, I get my movies and MP3s and chat rooms and everything else. In 1988 I had a 1200 baud modem. In 2008 I have a 6 megabit dedicated Internet feed. "Waah waah," indeed! Your response? "I have my head in the sand/my ass." Well, again -- as well-reasoned and cogent an argument as that may be, it's just not a compelling reason to go IPv6, in my opinion.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a small but growing number of folks who think IPv6 may be stillborn. The rationale goes something like this:
1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.
2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.
3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which doe
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
at the hardware level, I see no reason why any hardware equipment needs modification to support IPv6, unless you rely on "firmware-accelerated" hardware
100% of the network core uses firmware accelerated hardware. General purpose computers at the moment can't reliably move data much above 750mbps between multiple interfaces.
IPv4 exhaustion is a myth (Score:2, Funny)
Misleading title (Score:3, Informative)
The title "No IPV6 for UK broadband users" is significantly misleading. BT are far from being the only broadband provider in the UK. My ISP - using ADSL over BT lines - provides me with full IPv6 connectivity and has done for some time.
BT and the other big players are targeting the mass market and Joe Public hasn't even heard of IPv6 yet, let alone asked for it. If you want competent technical support then you don't use BT or any of the other mass-market players.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
In this case "BT" actually means "BT wholesale", so the issue applies to any ISP which uses BT's DSL platform. This includes both AAISP (the ISP in the linked article) and Entanet (resold by various other ISPs), the only two UK ISPs I know of who offer native IPv6 over DSL.
Commercial home products and IPv6 (Score:2)
As far as I'm aware, business-grade networking stuff has been IPv6 aware and compliant for a few years now, but I've yet to see a Router marketed towards the home user that seemed to support it. I bought myself a new Wireless-N ADSL2+ router/modem comby unit only a few weeks ago and IPv6 isn't mentioned anywhere near it. I'd love to see a good Router that supported IPv6 and didn't cost 3 figures, does anyone here know of any out there?
Is it possible for ISPs to run an IPv6 network while the home users still
here in the states (Score:4, Interesting)
we are switching over from analog to digital television transmission in february 2009. at that date, analog tv will simply disappear. if you have an older tv without a converter, it simply won't work. to get this to happen, the government and broadcasters had to sit down, make a timetable, and implement it
in this way, and ONLY IN THIS WAY, were we ever going to switch to digital transmission. furthermore, in this way, and only in this way, will any country ever make the switch to IPv6
there is no free market solution to this problem. in fact, according to principles of the free market, you are punished for making the extra expense and becoming a first adapter: you spend all this time and money, and no one is going to consume what you offer on the new protocol. why? because everyone is making their material avaiable on IPv4, so that's where the audience stays. the inertia is heavy
so either everyone switches to IPv6, or no one switches IPv6. there is no gradual changeover, because there is no incentive, and only punishment for all of the effort, for being a first adapter
governments have to mandate IPv6 changeover. that is only way IPv6 will ever happen. doesn't matter in the slightest how superior IPv6 is. punishment of early adapters trumps all observations of technological superiority
Non-story. (Score:4, Informative)
So in short, as soon as they start having to pay more for IPv4 blocks, they'll update their firmware. Merely some billable network admin hours, not millions of pounds wasted as the summary implies.
Offshore IP address drilling (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It might me possible that there's not much demand for static IPs in UK. When most customers don't have problems with DHCP, IPv4 address space will be sufficient because not all customers would be using their connections 24 hours.
There's a few problems with that statement:
First: Unlike dialup users, broadband users tend to stay connected continuously (always-on).
Second: Even if the users were to disconnect from their service provider when not using the service, the DHCP lease would probably still be assigned.
Plus, it's not a long-term solution. Much like the other broadband issues here in the US (capacity), restricting users will only work temporarily. Eventually you'll still need to upgrade the system.
~t
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Nope. This isn't a problem with CPE support for IPv6, it's a problem in BT's network.
There's some more information in this discussion thread:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=btsupplier&Number=3448119&page=1&view=expanded&sb=5&o=0&fpart= [adslguide.org.uk]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Try reading the article. AAISP states that the problem is in BT's routers and a patch is available but they would rather say they don't support IPv6 than install the patch. How is it FUD?
Re:Wait a second... (Score:4, Informative)
BT provides the backbone network and local loop used by most UK ISPs. AAISP is trying to provide IPv6 and can't because BT won't fix a bug in their network. Where's the FUD?
Parent