Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
Internet service provider PlusNet, which is part of the wider BT Group, has informed customers that they’re “now ready” to finally start trials of Internet Protocol v6 (IPv6) addressing on their “High Touch” broadband network. The ISP has previously only conducted a small scale technical trial on their “Low Touch” network (here) – used by c. 90% of customers.
Just for context. IP addresses help to connect your software and devices with others around the online world – like an ID number for your connection. The issue these days is that the existing IPv4 address space has been exhausted, which makes it difficult to add new connections without compromising by sharing IPs between many users (CGNAT, MAP-T etc.) or spending big to buy additional v4 addresses.
The long-term solution to the above challenge is adoption of IPv6 addresses, which are not directly compatible with IPv4 and so require a bit of an investment in order to make both work properly side-by-side (e.g. Dual Stack or other methods). So far both of PlusNet’s parents, BT and EE, have long since deployed IPv6 and that has left their smaller sibling to look a little out of sorts.
The good news, as spotted by ISPreview, is that PlusNet’s Enterprise Architect (Network & OSS), Dave Tomlinson, has now announced that they are finally “ready to trial IPv6 on our High Touch broadband network“. The ISP operates 2 slightly different broadband networks, one for dynamic IP addresses (“Low Touch” – most of their customers) and one for customers with static IP address, have the broadband firewall turned on and a few other things (“High Touch“).
Dave Tomlinson said:
“We’ve been testing IPv6 internally on high touch and would now like to open up the trial to a few customers so that we can get some feedback and see how it works with people with different devices and different setups.
Spaces for the trial are limited so we might have to cap the number of applicants if there’s a lot of interest.
Trial criteria to take part is:
➤ You must currently have a static IPv4 address (or a 4 or 8 block)
➤ You must have an IPv6 capable router (Plusnet Hub 2 is fine or one of your own)
➤ We recommend you have at least one PC/Mac running Mac OS, Linux or Windows 10/11 in case you need to diagnose any issues.”
Dave later confirmed that they’re running a dual stack IPv4/IPv6 setup, so your (customer) router will get allocated both the existing static IPv4 and also a /56 IPv6 prefix. Devices on your LAN will continue to be allocated a private IPv4 address e.g. 192.168.1.x or 10.0.0.x, but will also be allocated one or more public IPv6 addresses where they support IPv6.
Dave explained:
“I’ve got a mixture of devices on my network where some support IPv6 like my Linux server, Mac and iPhone and some don’t like my lightbulbs and TV. The ones that don’t support IPv6 just work exactly as they did before I had IPv6. LAN traffic is IPv4 and then it’s NAT’d out to the Internet using the IPv4 public IP.
For the devices that do support IPv6 then where the service they are connecting to supports IPv6 like this forum or Netflix or Google then the traffic should favour IPv6. And where the service doesn’t support IPv6 like www.plus.net then it will favour IPv4. That’s mostly done at a DNS level, where if you get a AAAA DNS record with an IPv6 address it should try IPv6 first and where there’s only IPv4 DNS records it’ll just do IPv4.
There are other ways of doing IPv6 and IPv4 where you might only get an IPv6 address on your router and no IPv4 public address or you get a CG-NAT IPv4 and IPv6, we aren’t trialling any of those so on our trial you should see every device either getting both IPv4 and IPv6 or just IPv4 (potentially there are some IoT devices that just do IPv6 but unless you already have an IPv6 tunnel broker account or similar we probably don’t need to think about those at the moment).”
Customers who wish to take part should express their desire via this Plusnet Forum Thread, although only a small portion of their base are currently using the provider’s High Touch network. At this stage we don’t know how long this trial will last or when the final change may be fully deployed, but given that this is PlusNet then it’s probably best not to speculate (they’re infamous for long-running trials and IPv6 was first tested back in.. 2011! here).