7 ms·

Aussie ISP gets eye-watering IPv4 bill, shifts to IPv6

38 points by lelf 7y ago

LIV2 7y ago
It would be nice if the Aussie broadband market would start enabling IPv6 but the pessimist in me thinks they'll just turn on CG-NAT and call it a day. Since most consumers don't care, and CG-NAT bandaids the problem I don't see how the market will be motivated to spend the time/money to bring us IPv6. We're probably going to be stuck with shitty bandaid solutions for a while
- danpalmer 7y ago
  I’m visiting Australia at the moment and the state of internet connectivity in central Melbourne is pretty poor. Very slow internet at my AirBnBs, generally very poor WiFi availability and speeds in public, the co-working space I’m in (that is otherwise excellent) is a similar speed to my home connection in London. Above all, latency makes some websites considerably less pleasant to use, and SSH to most places is painful. I know that’s not something the local market can necessarily fix though.
  - isostatic 7y ago
    I've thought about working in Aus for a few months over a (northern) winter - what visa did you get?
    - danpalmer 7y ago
      I got a regular tourist visa. My main reason for visiting is seeing people, and I'm just doing a bit of remote work for a UK based company during time that I'm not seeing people. I'm not being paid in Aus, still being paid at home in £. I don't believe that counts as "working in Australia". I'm here for 1 month, I think the tourist visa allows you to visit for up to 3 months. This is not visa advice.
  - koyote 7y ago
    As someone who moved to Australia from London, I can confirm: the latency is the real killer. I'm one of the few lucky ones with FTTP which gets me close to 100mbit speeds. But as soon as I have to connect to a server outside of Oz I am pretty much back to (high) ADSL speeds. Latency to the US and Singapore (the two closest international backbones) is around 150-200ms. It's around double that for Europe. At peak times those backbones get very congested. Funnily the only country I've been to that has faster and more consistent 4g was Japan.
    - danpalmer 7y ago
      100MB is still not great for business premises. At home in London I'm on 80MB fibre, and get ~76MB during peak times. At work in London we have 1GB (and typically get 1.2GB) between ~80 people. This co-working space is ~85MB for a similar number of people.
- Arbalest 7y ago
  They did have it available opt in for a short while, but it broke so they stopped doing it.
- revilo951 7y ago
  I have a service with Aussie broadband, and I'm participating in the IPv6 beta. It's being activity worked on. The staff are highly communicative with those in the beta. It's been great so far.
  - LIV2 7y ago
    Aussie Broadband seem to be the only ISP that puts any effort in and cares about their customers, I hope they don't get bought and become another part of TPG
    - jazoom 7y ago
      They've stuffed up my billing every month for 12 months now. I've told them numerous times and they still can't fix whatever problem they have. I'm glad other people are having more luck with them.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  CG-NAT doesn't help you internally, which is why big US ISPs went to IPv6. For your own infrastructure, re-using the same addresses over and over, as in a CG-NAT scheme, makes it far easier for mistakes to happen and far harder to diagnose them. Your network becomes a fragile component that your own network engineers are frightened to touch, hurting your ability to compete as a network provider. What's 10.20.30.40? Your own notes show you use 10.20.30.40 in Sector A of the country for a Cisco router but you also named a different device, a microwave transceiver in Sector B of the country 10.20.30.40 with the NAT supposedly separating the two. So packets supposedly "from" 10.20.30.40 could be the Cisco router playing up again, but they could be that microwave transceiver misbehaving, or they could be CPE leaking a customer's internal addresses into your CG-NAT network. If you try to "solve" this over the network you might end up talking to a "different" 10.20.30.40 than the one causing problems and make things worse. Once you realise you want IPv6 internally, it's not a huge leap to realise that you might as well at least _offer_ this to customers too.
  - rahimnathwani 7y ago
    There are <20M address in the IPv4 private address space, vs. maybe ~100M smartphones in the USA. So, yes, you need to reuse addresses internally if you have more than 20% market share. But until all web sites and services have migrated to IPv6, each smartphone still needs an IPv4 address, right? How does introducing IPv6 internally solve the problem you described, if a significant portion of traffic is still using IPv4?
    - berti 7y ago
      I remember reading a few articles about a US mobile carrier successfully going IPv6 only with 464XLAT. Turns out my memory was correct and it was T-Mobile [0]. [0] https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/case-study-t-mobile-us-goes-ipv6-only-using-464xlat/ https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/cas...
    - Nyandalized 7y ago
      I believe every effort should be done to further the transition and make it less cumbersome in the future. Just the mental effect of "we're already partially using it" is invaluable
- gwillz 7y ago
  Legit Internode had native ipv6 enabled by default since 2008. Whirlpool still exists also. https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/hw_feature_242 https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/hw_feature_242
  - LIV2 7y ago
    I had read that they aren't doing IPv6 on NBN connections though? It seems that there has been a bit more adoption of it since I last checked which must have been a while ago, I'm surprised to see Telstra on the list!
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  I'm 'stuck' on Internode as they're still the only carrier that I can get that'll offer IPv6 on NBN fibre for a decent price. Even the rest of TPG's sub-brands don't offer v6. It's painful.
CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
I have Comcast cable Internet in California. I own my own cable modem, and my own router (an Asus RT-AC68U). Over a year ago, I decided to check out if I could do IPv6. And indeed I could! I am now getting a dynamically-allocated /64 block, which is used to make allocations to my desktop and my phone. From my perspective, IPv6 just works! I hope, in two or so years, they come back to the same conference with a report of how much traffic has moved to IPv6.
rohan1024 7y ago
> we are now looking at carrier-grade NAT vendors as a longer term solution rather then buying more IPv4 space That's even worse. I read a definition of Internet long back which I vaguely remember A network of devices where each device is assigned with unique IP address so that they can communicate with each other. No central party is needed for two devices to connect with each other! This always fascinated me. But NAT breaks that definition or was the definition wrong? It no longer holds true. IPV6 is the only hope. I've wrote more about it here https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_broken_promise_of_internet/ https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_broken_promise_of_internet/
- cm2187 7y ago
  Also IPv6 makes scanning the address space infeasible. This is the only realistic hope to get a bit more security in IoT.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    That seems like security through obscurity. I have other hopes to get IoT more secure. Open source firmware, for starters. Support contracts where you don't buy the hardware but buy a working (and insecure isn't working) device. The problem with IPv6 is that it is a chicken-egg problem. Those who get CGNAT plus native IPv6 are part of the unfortunate bunch who are not using native IPv4 (and therefore miss out on certain IPv4-only services). Meanwhile, the IPv4-only services are causing issues for CGNAT. The logical conclusion is that everyone who currently offers IPv4-only should (and should've been) focusing on adopting native IPv6 dual stack. The continuous procrastination, out of greed and egocentric thinking, is what caused the current situation in the first place. My ISP tried to shove CGNAT with native IPv6 through my throat. My modem was unstable. BitTorrent didn't work well anymore. I could not use services over LTE anymore (my LTE provider, actually same provider as my cable, used IPv4-only back then; don't know now). I relied on that to work. So they gave me what I had before: IPv4 only. Why not dual stack first?
    - cm2187 7y ago
      Having to guess a 128bit AES key is also security through obscurity then! Though it doesn't give any protection against local scanning.
cm2187 7y ago
In the UK, BT officially enabled IPv6 but it is a "maybe" IPv6. Sometimes it is enabled, sometimes not. It is 2019....
- danpalmer 7y ago
  From my experience it’s consistently IPv6. Is it that some small areas of their network are v4 only still, but the majority is v6? At my employer we typically find IPv6 is 25-30% of our traffic. It’s better than I thought it would be but still not great. Much of that percentage is BT and Sky.
- rwmj 7y ago
  My advice would be get a better ISP. I have rock solid IPv6 here in the UK with a /48 and a RIPE record.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    Unfortunately where I live there is only one fibre to the premise provider and that's not going to change. I don't care about IPv6 enough to swap fibre to the premise for DSL.
    - isostatic 7y ago
      Doesn't your FTTP provider give IPv6 then? I have a BT Openreach fibre, and A&A give IPV6, and several v4s
      - cm2187 7y ago
        I use BT openreach too. They do but as I said patchy connectivity. I see that when I run nslookup in windows which isn't smart enough to fall back to IPv4 DNS when v6 is not reachable. It seems to be on and off.
        isostatic 7y ago
        You're on A&A and getting patchy connectivity?
nik736 7y ago
This has nothing to do with native IPv6. They are putting 1000s of customers behind one single IPv4 address which is a nightmare for everyone involved (think about port forwarding not working anymore, etc.)
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  What makes you think they'll use just one address and not a pool?
  - nik736 7y ago
    I didn't say they were using just one address. I was saying they are putting 100s or 1000s of customers behind one single address (which is happening in Europe for years already, with UPC for example). Of course they have several IPv4 addresses.
  - ripdog 7y ago
    It really doesn't matter. The result is the same.
rstuart4133 7y ago
I don't have much sympathy. What I read is an ISP saying "gee, all those IPv4 addresses we use internally are costing us a mint, whatever shall I do?". I see lots of comments here about the merits of IPv4 v IPv6 v CG-NAT. That's all irrelevant. Aussie Broadband, like all Australian ISP's, provide their customers with a router configured to do NAT. If like me you don't want that your on your own you are better off purchasing your own gear. They won't support you, but at least you will be familiar with it. For some ISP's like Optus you have no choice - they've crippled the firmware in their routers so you can't change it. Given the router is doing NAT they can use any carrier. And indeed, some Australian NBN ISP's use IPv4/DHCP, some use PPPoE and others were at one point doing QinQ and of course for pre-NBN ADSL connections it was ATM. Whatever, if your router is doing NAT it doesn't doesn't effect the customer one way or the other. IPv6 is a perfectly reasonable choice for a carrier in those circumstances, and for bonus points it means you can give your customer routeable IP addresses. (It would simplify my home setup considerably.) And it doesn't use a single paid for IPv4 for internal routing! As for the hand wringing about the price - we've known this was coming for decades. We've figured out the solution and it's been available for purchase for years. They've almost certainly replaced their gear at least once in those years. They definitely replaced the routers they've handed out to customers because of the NBN rollout. If they didn't replace it with something IPv6 capable that's piss poor planning - particularly so because unlike most countries the NBN roll out gave Australian ISP's the perfect opportunity to do it.
jolmg 7y ago
Sometimes I worry if ISPs aren't incentivized to chose IPv6 over just having CG-NAT. Of the ISPs that are available in my area, some are doing just CG-NAT and no IPv6.

38 points by lelf 7y ago

LIV2 7y ago

It would be nice if the Aussie broadband market would start enabling IPv6 but the pessimist in me thinks they'll just turn on CG-NAT and call it a day. Since most consumers don't care, and CG-NAT bandaids the problem I don't see how the market will be motivated to spend the time/money to bring us IPv6. We're probably going to be stuck with shitty bandaid solutions for a while

danpalmer 7y ago
I’m visiting Australia at the moment and the state of internet connectivity in central Melbourne is pretty poor. Very slow internet at my AirBnBs, generally very poor WiFi availability and speeds in public, the co-working space I’m in (that is otherwise excellent) is a similar speed to my home connection in London. Above all, latency makes some websites considerably less pleasant to use, and SSH to most places is painful. I know that’s not something the local market can necessarily fix though.
- isostatic 7y ago
  I've thought about working in Aus for a few months over a (northern) winter - what visa did you get?
  - danpalmer 7y ago
    I got a regular tourist visa. My main reason for visiting is seeing people, and I'm just doing a bit of remote work for a UK based company during time that I'm not seeing people. I'm not being paid in Aus, still being paid at home in £. I don't believe that counts as "working in Australia". I'm here for 1 month, I think the tourist visa allows you to visit for up to 3 months. This is not visa advice.
- koyote 7y ago
  As someone who moved to Australia from London, I can confirm: the latency is the real killer. I'm one of the few lucky ones with FTTP which gets me close to 100mbit speeds. But as soon as I have to connect to a server outside of Oz I am pretty much back to (high) ADSL speeds. Latency to the US and Singapore (the two closest international backbones) is around 150-200ms. It's around double that for Europe. At peak times those backbones get very congested. Funnily the only country I've been to that has faster and more consistent 4g was Japan.
  - danpalmer 7y ago
    100MB is still not great for business premises. At home in London I'm on 80MB fibre, and get ~76MB during peak times. At work in London we have 1GB (and typically get 1.2GB) between ~80 people. This co-working space is ~85MB for a similar number of people.
Arbalest 7y ago
They did have it available opt in for a short while, but it broke so they stopped doing it.
revilo951 7y ago
I have a service with Aussie broadband, and I'm participating in the IPv6 beta. It's being activity worked on. The staff are highly communicative with those in the beta. It's been great so far.
- LIV2 7y ago
  Aussie Broadband seem to be the only ISP that puts any effort in and cares about their customers, I hope they don't get bought and become another part of TPG
  - jazoom 7y ago
    They've stuffed up my billing every month for 12 months now. I've told them numerous times and they still can't fix whatever problem they have. I'm glad other people are having more luck with them.
tialaramex 7y ago
CG-NAT doesn't help you internally, which is why big US ISPs went to IPv6. For your own infrastructure, re-using the same addresses over and over, as in a CG-NAT scheme, makes it far easier for mistakes to happen and far harder to diagnose them. Your network becomes a fragile component that your own network engineers are frightened to touch, hurting your ability to compete as a network provider. What's 10.20.30.40? Your own notes show you use 10.20.30.40 in Sector A of the country for a Cisco router but you also named a different device, a microwave transceiver in Sector B of the country 10.20.30.40 with the NAT supposedly separating the two. So packets supposedly "from" 10.20.30.40 could be the Cisco router playing up again, but they could be that microwave transceiver misbehaving, or they could be CPE leaking a customer's internal addresses into your CG-NAT network. If you try to "solve" this over the network you might end up talking to a "different" 10.20.30.40 than the one causing problems and make things worse. Once you realise you want IPv6 internally, it's not a huge leap to realise that you might as well at least _offer_ this to customers too.
- rahimnathwani 7y ago
  There are <20M address in the IPv4 private address space, vs. maybe ~100M smartphones in the USA. So, yes, you need to reuse addresses internally if you have more than 20% market share. But until all web sites and services have migrated to IPv6, each smartphone still needs an IPv4 address, right? How does introducing IPv6 internally solve the problem you described, if a significant portion of traffic is still using IPv4?
  - berti 7y ago
    I remember reading a few articles about a US mobile carrier successfully going IPv6 only with 464XLAT. Turns out my memory was correct and it was T-Mobile [0]. [0] https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/case-study-t-mobile-us-goes-ipv6-only-using-464xlat/ https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/cas...
  - Nyandalized 7y ago
    I believe every effort should be done to further the transition and make it less cumbersome in the future. Just the mental effect of "we're already partially using it" is invaluable
gwillz 7y ago
Legit Internode had native ipv6 enabled by default since 2008. Whirlpool still exists also. https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/hw_feature_242 https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/hw_feature_242
- LIV2 7y ago
  I had read that they aren't doing IPv6 on NBN connections though? It seems that there has been a bit more adoption of it since I last checked which must have been a while ago, I'm surprised to see Telstra on the list!
paranoidrobot 7y ago
I'm 'stuck' on Internode as they're still the only carrier that I can get that'll offer IPv6 on NBN fibre for a decent price. Even the rest of TPG's sub-brands don't offer v6. It's painful.

CaliforniaKarl 7y ago

I have Comcast cable Internet in California. I own my own cable modem, and my own router (an Asus RT-AC68U). Over a year ago, I decided to check out if I could do IPv6. And indeed I could! I am now getting a dynamically-allocated /64 block, which is used to make allocations to my desktop and my phone. From my perspective, IPv6 just works! I hope, in two or so years, they come back to the same conference with a report of how much traffic has moved to IPv6.

rohan1024 7y ago

> we are now looking at carrier-grade NAT vendors as a longer term solution rather then buying more IPv4 space That's even worse. I read a definition of Internet long back which I vaguely remember A network of devices where each device is assigned with unique IP address so that they can communicate with each other. No central party is needed for two devices to connect with each other! This always fascinated me. But NAT breaks that definition or was the definition wrong? It no longer holds true. IPV6 is the only hope. I've wrote more about it here https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_broken_promise_of_internet/ https://www.ankshilp.in/post/the_broken_promise_of_internet/

cm2187 7y ago
Also IPv6 makes scanning the address space infeasible. This is the only realistic hope to get a bit more security in IoT.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  That seems like security through obscurity. I have other hopes to get IoT more secure. Open source firmware, for starters. Support contracts where you don't buy the hardware but buy a working (and insecure isn't working) device. The problem with IPv6 is that it is a chicken-egg problem. Those who get CGNAT plus native IPv6 are part of the unfortunate bunch who are not using native IPv4 (and therefore miss out on certain IPv4-only services). Meanwhile, the IPv4-only services are causing issues for CGNAT. The logical conclusion is that everyone who currently offers IPv4-only should (and should've been) focusing on adopting native IPv6 dual stack. The continuous procrastination, out of greed and egocentric thinking, is what caused the current situation in the first place. My ISP tried to shove CGNAT with native IPv6 through my throat. My modem was unstable. BitTorrent didn't work well anymore. I could not use services over LTE anymore (my LTE provider, actually same provider as my cable, used IPv4-only back then; don't know now). I relied on that to work. So they gave me what I had before: IPv4 only. Why not dual stack first?
  - cm2187 7y ago
    Having to guess a 128bit AES key is also security through obscurity then! Though it doesn't give any protection against local scanning.

cm2187 7y ago

In the UK, BT officially enabled IPv6 but it is a "maybe" IPv6. Sometimes it is enabled, sometimes not. It is 2019....

danpalmer 7y ago
From my experience it’s consistently IPv6. Is it that some small areas of their network are v4 only still, but the majority is v6? At my employer we typically find IPv6 is 25-30% of our traffic. It’s better than I thought it would be but still not great. Much of that percentage is BT and Sky.
rwmj 7y ago
My advice would be get a better ISP. I have rock solid IPv6 here in the UK with a /48 and a RIPE record.
- cm2187 7y ago
  Unfortunately where I live there is only one fibre to the premise provider and that's not going to change. I don't care about IPv6 enough to swap fibre to the premise for DSL.
  - isostatic 7y ago
    Doesn't your FTTP provider give IPv6 then? I have a BT Openreach fibre, and A&A give IPV6, and several v4s
    - cm2187 7y ago
      I use BT openreach too. They do but as I said patchy connectivity. I see that when I run nslookup in windows which isn't smart enough to fall back to IPv4 DNS when v6 is not reachable. It seems to be on and off.
      - isostatic 7y ago
        You're on A&A and getting patchy connectivity?

nik736 7y ago

This has nothing to do with native IPv6. They are putting 1000s of customers behind one single IPv4 address which is a nightmare for everyone involved (think about port forwarding not working anymore, etc.)

AstralStorm 7y ago
What makes you think they'll use just one address and not a pool?
- nik736 7y ago
  I didn't say they were using just one address. I was saying they are putting 100s or 1000s of customers behind one single address (which is happening in Europe for years already, with UPC for example). Of course they have several IPv4 addresses.
- ripdog 7y ago
  It really doesn't matter. The result is the same.

rstuart4133 7y ago

I don't have much sympathy. What I read is an ISP saying "gee, all those IPv4 addresses we use internally are costing us a mint, whatever shall I do?". I see lots of comments here about the merits of IPv4 v IPv6 v CG-NAT. That's all irrelevant. Aussie Broadband, like all Australian ISP's, provide their customers with a router configured to do NAT. If like me you don't want that your on your own you are better off purchasing your own gear. They won't support you, but at least you will be familiar with it. For some ISP's like Optus you have no choice - they've crippled the firmware in their routers so you can't change it. Given the router is doing NAT they can use any carrier. And indeed, some Australian NBN ISP's use IPv4/DHCP, some use PPPoE and others were at one point doing QinQ and of course for pre-NBN ADSL connections it was ATM. Whatever, if your router is doing NAT it doesn't doesn't effect the customer one way or the other. IPv6 is a perfectly reasonable choice for a carrier in those circumstances, and for bonus points it means you can give your customer routeable IP addresses. (It would simplify my home setup considerably.) And it doesn't use a single paid for IPv4 for internal routing! As for the hand wringing about the price - we've known this was coming for decades. We've figured out the solution and it's been available for purchase for years. They've almost certainly replaced their gear at least once in those years. They definitely replaced the routers they've handed out to customers because of the NBN rollout. If they didn't replace it with something IPv6 capable that's piss poor planning - particularly so because unlike most countries the NBN roll out gave Australian ISP's the perfect opportunity to do it.

jolmg 7y ago

Sometimes I worry if ISPs aren't incentivized to chose IPv6 over just having CG-NAT. Of the ISPs that are available in my area, some are doing just CG-NAT and no IPv6.