Tuesday 14 February 2023

UK ISPs and (lack of) IPv6

TCP/IP is the protocol used to access the Internet. Users may be familiar with IPv4 style numeric addresses which look like 192.168.0.1 - that is four numbers each of which can be from 0 to 255. An example IPv6 address looks like this 2001:db8:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888

Whilst there is a huge amount of waste with some organisations having more IPv4 addresses than they need and with some possible addresses being reserved the world has officially ran out of available IPv4 addresses in November 2019. Fortunately by using Network Address Translation - NAT the impact of this to your average user is minimal. Nethertheless it was rightly deemed necessary for an official solution to be created and this is to use a newer address protocol known as IPv6.

Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses come from finite pools of numbers. For IPv4, this pool is 32-bits (232) in size and contains 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses. The IPv6 address space is 128-bits (2128) in size, containing 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IPv6 addresses.

A lot of websites already fully support IPv6 and so do all computer/device operating systems such as macOS, iOS, Linux and Windows along with nearly all currently used network equipment. Unfortunately the sad reality is that the overwhelming majority of UK ISPs still do not support IPv6. 😦

See - Update on IPv6 Plans for Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Plusnet and Vodafone

Note: British Telecom is the main exception to this as they do support IPv6. (The mobile phone 5G networks also support 5G as the use of IPv6 for 5G was part of the 5G design process.)

Since I could not rely on the majority of UK ISPs to provide me IPv6 connectivity and since I am a hardcore techie, I decided to solve this myself. This was done by obtaining a 6in4 tunnel which allows sending IPv6 over an IPv4 connection.

When IPv6 was being first rolled out there were a number of free 6in4 tunnel providers but most have now ceased to be available because they assume most ISPs would be able to offer native IPv6 by now or that us customers should beat up our providers to get this. (Fat chance!)

The most well known remaining 6in4 tunnel provider is Hurricane Internet and I did indeed use them successfully to create and use a 6in4 tunnel. All the IPv6 tests then passed. However as Hurricane are based in the US it had an unintended side effect which is that some IPv6 websites considered me to also be located in the US. This has recently become more and more of a problem with a number of TV streaming services blocking my access as a result.

As mentioned most other tunnel providers no longer offer a service but fortunately I have been able to find one that unlike Hurricane Internet does offer choices as to where their tunnel appears to be located. This one - TunnelBroker.ch therefore enabled me to create a 6in4 tunnel that is located in the UK and hence the TV streaming services are now happy. 😃

For those interested this site https://test-ipv6.com/ is a good one to test if you have working IPv6 connectivity.

This site https://whatismyipaddress.com/ is a good one to show what your public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are.

This one https://tools.keycdn.com/geo shows your presumed geographic location for IPv6.

Note: Whilst it is possible to configure macOS, Linux and Windows themselves to establish the 6in4 tunnel connection it is not possible to do this on iOS, Apple TV, or other sealed config devices. I therefore set the tunnel up in my own Draytek Vigor ADSL router and it then provides IPv6 addresses to all devices on my home network including my Apple TV box.

As a bonus since the IPv6 tunnel belongs to me and is nothing to do with my ISP, if/when I change ISP the tunnel settings will be completely unaffected and my IPv6 addresses will also be unchanged.