Virgin Media slides fat 10Gbps pipes into Murdoch's BSkyB The business end of Virgin Media has revealed more details about a £49m deal to beef up BSkyB's broadband network. Virgin Media announced last month - in what is likely to be its final quarterly report to the City before being acquired by US cable giant Liberty Global - that it had bagged "major backhaul contract wins" from …
I do hope this new core network is IPv6 capable from day one.
The creeping IPv4 shortage (which everyone saw coming years ago but few were willing to prepare for) is starting to cause some nasty developments. After PlusNet decided to invest in Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) instead of IPv6 the first outrage became evident. (http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/plusnet-ipv4-ipv6-nap-networking-104349).
Then, earlier this month, BT started to put some of its Broadband customers behind CGN (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/381646/customers-fume-as-bt-introduces-ip-sharing), causing more people to become upset.
The issue is that NAT at home is a lot more flexible than CGN. If you own your own NAT router you can use UPNP or manually open ports to get things working. With CGN you can't.
These BT and PlusNet customers are now finding out the hard way which things stop working. The DHT feature of the Torrent protocol is one, but worse for average customers is the loss of things such as XBOX Live. No more multiplayer games on the XBOX after your ISP has taken away your IPv4 address.
My own ISP is BeBroadband who were making progress with their IPv6 preparations. However, as they have just been sold to Sky, I am getting worried they may put it on ice if Sky's infrastructure isn't IPv6 ready.
I want the real Internet, not some crippled version behind CGN.
The trouble is, most consumer level ISPs don't see the point; a large proportion of their customer base couldn't give a flyer what type of IP they get, as long as it 'just works™'. And if you phone and ask a service droid about IPv6, this is unlikely to be in their vocabulary and return a not found error. And until this lack of address-space starts costing the ISP money (either in support costs, pre-sales leads not joining, or customers walking away) then they're not likely to invest in getting their infrastructure setup for v6.
For the foreseeable future, I think if you want a proper 'traditional' IP address, plus the modern IPv6 address, you're going to have to pay a premium for it. This is why I subscribe to AAISP. Damn its expensive, but its got the technical bells and whistles that I need to get the most out of my internet connection. I suppose its the difference between a standard Ford Focus and a Mercedes S-Class. Both do a similar thing, but one comes with extra toys for those that want it, but you pay a fair bit extra for it.
I used to want the real internet too(back when I hosted stuff at home). Many years ago I decided to move my services to a colo and have been happy since (my home ISP kept getting bought out and forcing IP address changes).
There's nothing I use that doesn't work behind CGNAT for my home use(I haven't played games online in a decade). I believe my phone is on CGNAT, and when my laptop is connected to it I can't tell any difference.
Even if they gave you IPv6, chances are damn good that the majority of the remainder of those xbox live folks are on IPv4, so someone is going to have to NAT something.
CGNAT will break far less things than switching to IPv6. Though it would be nice to give customers dual stack support for those that know how to use it. Myself I turned down IPv6 for my 100meg connection at my colo (he.net) when they offered(they are a big IPv6 provider from what I can tell). Too much trouble for no benefit.
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