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Author Topic: Sky & IPv6  (Read 15794 times)

guest

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Sky & IPv6
« on: April 16, 2015, 04:00:48 PM »

It appears that roughly 18 months after they updated various older (ADSL) routers firmware to run a dual IPv4/IPv6 stack that Sky are finally ready to trial it.

I'd normally criticise the time they've taken but after the best part of 20 years its nice to see a major ISP outside the APNIC region (Asia-Pacific) finally bite the bullet & realise this HAS to be done. ISPs planning on running CGNAT (hello BT) need to get themselves out of the 20th century & employ core network staff who have a clue (BT currently don't, the beancounters got their way & anyone talented has long since departed).

The trial is initially only available to ADSL customers using a Sagem router and (obviously) only on LLU exchanges with Sky MSANs.

I would expect the SR101/102 to be the next trial phase - probably towards autumn.

The Sky TV box is already dual-stack although I don't know whether that firmware is updated to dual-stack only if you're a Sky BB customer or not. I only noticed it recently.

I was doing IPv6 presentations to Pipex network staff 13 years ago (using AAISP) & no major ISP in all that time has even offered IPv6 to customers. Talk about burying your head in the sand or what?
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jelv

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #1 on: April 16, 2015, 06:44:30 PM »

Perhaps (like we jumped XP to 7 and next to 10) they were hoping to jump straight IPv8! :P
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Chrysalis

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #2 on: April 16, 2015, 08:41:59 PM »

I agree with rizla it is a sad state of affairs they have all just ignored it for so long.
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Weaver

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #3 on: July 12, 2015, 06:18:18 AM »

One of the difficulties that A&A had to get past was the fight to get consumer router manufacturers to step up and offer a cheap IPv6 basic router.

Now there are a few cheap CPE offerings to be had, cheap enough to be given away even.
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Chrysalis

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2015, 03:50:26 PM »

ipv6 I think is been rolled out within 1-2 months on sky, they are doing a soft launch in the next 2 weeks they said will last about 4 weeks.
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Codescribe

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2015, 04:55:54 PM »

Sky are asking for people on SR101 & SR102 hubs to sign up to trial IPv6.  It said we would here back in September if we were accepted on the trial.
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guest

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #6 on: September 13, 2015, 02:00:52 PM »

Well despite me telling them to opt me out of any beta-testing* it appears Sky don't listen as they have opted me into the IPv6 trial  ???

Its a rather strange trial as well because it appears to be only active on the LAN side  ::)

So I waken up this morning & notice exceptionally slow DNS resolution on my machine (which has been in sleep mode overnight). Takes a while to work it out as the Win2k3 server (yeah yeah I know) in the garage isn't throwing any errors up.

The reason for this is that Sky decided to enable an IPv6 DHCP server on the router  ???  Edit - the LAN IPv6 DHCP server is set to use a pseudo-random link-local block rather than a globally routed IPv6 block which says "NAT" to me. Probably makes my gripe clearer ;)

This little gem strongly implies that Sky don't get the point of IPv6 at all as why in the name of sanity would I need a NAT interface on IPv6 if its done properly?

Anyway this resulted in my machine having two ipv6 link-local addresses (one from the Win2k3 server and one from the router) and the initial lookup was on the wrong address. The lookup obviously fails and after timing out several times it falls back to the other IPv6 link-local address which then immediately falls back to IPv4 as the server knows it has no external IPv6 connectivity.

To cut a long story short, Sky have set the default state for the IPv6 stack to supply DHCP services to the LAN. Now (ignoring the wtf are you using NAT with IPv6? elephant in the room) this would be reasonably logical except of course that my router has IPv4 DHCP services disabled - the logical course of action then would be for the upgrade agent to set IPv6 DHCP disabled as well. These sort of glitches are what beta-tests are for but when you're not even on the damn beta-test then its mildly annoying when it eats your time up.

For information the current firmware on the SR102 is 2.88.1086.R - which, despite the "R", does not necessarily indicate that its release firmware.

In retrospect I suppose I'm lucky that Sky hadn't assigned an external IPv6 address or I wouldn't have noticed that the SR102 was now resolving DNS lookups - which I really don't want.

Hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who runs their own caching DNS resolver.

*its utterly pointless as Sky won't fix anything other than "gamestopper" bugs, and often not even those - SR101 still has the bug I identified 3 years ago which crashes the http proxy daemon (used for the "Block Sites using keyword" options). Gave them step by step instructions & told them why it was happening but they didn't give a damn.
« Last Edit: September 13, 2015, 03:04:53 PM by rizla »
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GigabitEthernet

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #7 on: September 13, 2015, 05:14:00 PM »

TalkTalk's newest routers also support IPv6 but when will they actually enable us to use it...?
« Last Edit: September 13, 2015, 05:48:34 PM by AlecR »
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guest

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #8 on: September 13, 2015, 05:46:00 PM »

When CGN becomes too much of an overhead would be my guess Alec. Sky are ahead of the curve for the simple reason that their "holy grail" is to reduce their dependance on satellite delivery of video/content & they were late to the party for RIPE allocations of IPv4 space.

I worked it out and it was February 2003 that I was doing IPv6 "rollout" presentations to Pipex. I feel even older now :P
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GigabitEthernet

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #9 on: September 13, 2015, 05:49:17 PM »

So you think Sky's ultimate plan is to abandon satellite altogether and provide all content over a broadband connection?
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guest

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #10 on: September 13, 2015, 06:02:05 PM »

Absolutely Alec as satellites are a single(ish) point of failure which can't be easily fixed/replaced.

Sky have more bandwidth between Birmingham & London than BT do.

That's one of the reasons they bought into Roku - edit the NowTV boxes are Roku with Sky firmware.
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Weaver

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #11 on: September 14, 2015, 03:30:38 AM »

Sky would lose a lot of customers without satellite, as the tv service would be inaccessible for all the users who don't have several Mbps available to them.
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guest

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #12 on: September 14, 2015, 08:03:57 AM »

They'd lose very few customers in the overall scheme of things (under 5% IMHO) but I doubt they have any imminent plans to turn off the satellites :)

It is however their "holy grail" and they've been working towards it fairly single-mindedly for at least the last 5 years - the York FTTP rollout is part of that plan, as is the huge investment in transit/backhaul between London (LINX etc) and points North.
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Weaver

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #13 on: September 14, 2015, 02:42:48 PM »

Concerning the single point of failure thing with satellites. I read a long and detailed report produced for OFCOM about satellite internet and the document mentioned a solution to the single point of failure problem using a cluster of satellites in space which were interconnected somehow.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2015, 12:18:32 AM by Weaver »
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guest

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Re: Sky & IPv6
« Reply #14 on: September 14, 2015, 02:58:32 PM »

Yeah there's some being launched later this year/early next year as part of the NBN "upgrade" stuff in Australia (their version of BDUK, more or less). It remains to see how viable they will be in financial terms. They'll probably do OK in Oz as the latency is going to be broadly comparable to terrestrial backhaul anyway but it'd be painful in the UK.

Sky can sell a lot more "stuff" with less risk (in every way) is the basic reason they want to move as much as possible to broadband for their TV/video services in the UK. I think their current "downloads/streaming" requests are running at something insane like 2 billion+ per year and a hell of a lot of those requests are coming from Roku/NowTV boxes rather than SkyTV boxes, many of which are almost obsolete now.

Apparently I'm not on the IPv6 trial but they loaded the firmware anyway. This is why I don't do Sky beta stuff anymore.
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