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News Sky IPv6 roll-out passes the 90 percent milestone

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 7 Sep 2016.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  2. IanW

    IanW Grumpy Old Git

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    So that's why my connection keeps timing out every 10-15mins! :wallbash:
    It seems I'm now on IPv6, but the rest of the interweb isn't.
     
  3. deathtaker27

    deathtaker27 Modder

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    I love reading this when http://aa.gg/ have been on ipv6 for over a decade if I remember right ...
     
  4. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Yeah, and have you seen AA's pricing? £35 for VDSL with a 100GB download limit after which you pay an additional £10 per 50GB; Sky's VDSL offering is £25 a month (£15 for the first twelve months) with no download limit (and having been a Sky customer, I can confirm 'no limit' genuinely means 'no limit.')

    I looked at switching to AA last time I was moving providers. I quickly looked elsewhere.
     
  5. SchizoFrog

    SchizoFrog What's a Dremel?

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    Talking of switching, how does BT rank against Sky? I am with Sky (Fibre) and thinking of switching as BT offer faster speeds (approx 60Mb to 40Mb) and more services for about the same price but I would like to know about their version of 'unlimited' and 'download management policies'.
     
  6. Saivert

    Saivert Minimodder

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    Article is incorrect. a /56 subnet means 256 individual networks. Not addresses.
    And on each network you can have millions of devices.
     
  7. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Funnily enough, I moved from Sky to BT, because at the time Sky's top-end package was 38Mb/s. I was originally getting around 74Mb/s with BT, but that's recently dropped to around 60Mb/s. As far as 'unlimited' goes, though, I've not a single complaint: there are months when I shove vast quantities of data through the pipe, and they've never once told me not to nor have I seen any evidence of throttling.

    Customer service, on the other hand, can be woeful - but on the occasions where my connection has faltered, I've been able to hop onto a neighbour's line for free using the bundled BT Wi-Fi credentials.

    My mistake; I haven't made the jump to IPv6 on my own network. I'll go fix that now, ta!
     
  8. rollo

    rollo Modder

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    Been with Sky since the switch from Bethere was told my download usage a few months back. Household was averaging 500-600gb a month. The person I spoke to said that's about average for there users.

    My guess you would have to be shoving 1Tb + before they would wonder and check, most heavy users on Sky Q will be easily passed this though as movies at 4K are near 50gb.
     
  9. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    I can guarantee that they don't check past 1TB, as I frequently went over 2TB (I was running a Tor relay at the time) and they never said a peep.
     
  10. Anfield

    Anfield Multimodder

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    I'm an Isps nightmare in regards to data usage and get zero complaints from BT and zero throttling.
    Just make sure to call BT to cancel your service the moment the min contract period is over, they are pretty good at handing out discounts to keep you.
     
  11. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag What's a Dremel?

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    As an advocate for IPv6, it's always great to see a reasonably priced ISP make a move. What I personally don't understand is why mobile broadband devices don't use IPv6. Seems like an obvious move to me yet nobody (to my knowledge) does this.

    Out of curiosity, are these users capable of accessing IPv4 parts of the internet? I assume Sky has figured out a way to do that but I understand that on the surface, that is a significant issue.


    Another cool thing to consider is Sky, according to Wikipedia, has 11 million customers. When you consider 90% of them have been transitioned to IPv6, that should mean 9.9 million IPv4 addresses have been freed, right? That's a pretty significant number.
     
  12. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Good news on the first aspect, bad news on the second: as far as I'm aware, Sky (in common with most consumer ISPs) is handling the move to IPv6 by dual-homing its customers. In other words, customers receive both IPv4 and IPv6 address assignations. The good news is that this means they can communicate with what I like to think of as Internet Classic without a problem; the bad news is that this does nothing to free up IPv4 address space.

    I could be wrong, as I can't find firm details on the matter via a quick search across Sky's site and I'm no longer a customer, but I'd be surprised if I was.
     
  13. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag What's a Dremel?

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    Ah I see. Well it wouldn't surprise me if you were right; the Internet needs to transition somehow, so having dual addresses makes sense. What I don't understand is why the ISP itself can't just take care of the transition. So for example let's say an IPv6 user wanted to go to an IPv4 website. Why couldn't the user just send an additional packet to the ISP's hop which helps translate whichever address the data should be sent from/to?

    I like to think of it like delivering a package, where IPv4 is a truck and IPv6 is a jet, and the airports and parcel offices are hop points. The package has the same destination regardless of what means of transportation it has. The jet is faster and can carry more, but is more restricted in where it can go. Specifically, the jet has it's own specific destination that is different from the package, but it is still worth using.
    The important thing to keep in mind is that even if a package is delivered solely by truck, it is still transitioned to a different truck after each post office it reaches; it will likely never stay in the same truck for the entire route. That being said, if the package needs to be transitioned anyway, why not transition it to the jet where possible?

    So, if what you're saying is true, that would be like saying "even though we have an airport and the destination lives near one, let's deliver this package entirely by truck anyway, because the destination is only accessible via truck". I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's what it looks like to me.

    I understand that in the perspective of the internet, there isn't really much of a performance gain to switch between IPv6 to IPv4 half way through. But a jet-only world could make deliveries easier, and I don't see how we can ever ditch trucks if the post office is too "lazy" to use airports.

    </rant>
     
  14. Nikumba

    Nikumba Minimodder

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    It is probaly a cost issue, I have not looked into it, but if the ISP has to translate ipv6 to ipv4 and back again, I could imagine the hardware for that is probably pricey, for not much financial gain.

    In terms of performance, I am not sure there is any gain in a connection being a pure ipv6 or ipv4 path, yes other network voodoo is probably supported by ipv6, but your average YouTuber is not going to notice.

    Kimbie
     
  15. Anfield

    Anfield Multimodder

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  16. Saivert

    Saivert Minimodder

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    There are many technologies for translating IPv4 TCP and UDP packets into IPv6 equivalents. You have proxies at the ISP level which can do the translation and special DNS servers that do the mapping.
    My phone carrier used this for a while but recently switched to native dual-stack instead.

    At home I have been using IPv6 since February 2013 and I have noticed no issue reaching any service. Everything Facebook and Google is IPv6. Bit-tech.net doesnt't do IPv6 yet though and I'm sure many websites will be slow at making the change. I'm not even sure if the datacenter Bit-tech uses offers IPv6. THey might not and then it is hard to add IPv6. Not sure many would want to change datacenter just for that yet.
    Any VPS you rent from Digital Ocean will get IPv6 f.ex.
     
  17. itrush07

    itrush07 Minimodder

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    Hmm, so what do we expect when we are converted into this thing? Slow or fast internet connection...
     

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