Tag Archives: IPv6

BT Retail quietly trials CGNAT on some of their customer connections

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According to this news story on ISPreview.co.uk, BT Retail are quietly trialling Carrier Grade NAT on some of their customer connections,  This is the first of the ‘Big 5’ that are known to be doing so, not long after the Plusnet (also owned by BT) trial took place.  To me, this suggests that we are now at the point where even the big ISPs no longer have the IPv4 addresses to allocate to customers, and the article suggests that up nine other customers will be sharing a single address, if you have been placed on this trial.

The worry here is that all of the Big 5 will just use this as an excuse to delay IPv6 adoption further, when what we really need is mass adoption of IPv6 folllowed by, if and only if necessary, CGNAT for all the “legacy” applications still left on the Internet.

BT’s official FAQ on the matter can be found here.

And now the fun begins…

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Today marks the firing of the starting gun in the next phase of IPv4 exhaustion.  To date, running NATs on the ISP side has generally been the preserve of the mobile operators, where running servers generally isn’t something you’d want or need to do over a mobile connection.  However, something new happened today – Plusnet, the Sheffield-based (and BT Group owned) ISP announced they are going to run a 3-week trial of CGNAT, or Carrier Grade NAT.

Some more info on that can be found here:

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/01/isp-plusnet-trials-controversial-ipv4-address-sharing-as-ipv6-alternative.html
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/5658-plusnet-in-trial-of-carrier-grade-nat-to-conserve-ipv4-addresses.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/15/ipv4_nat/

Now, the term “carrier grade” has, to date, normally meant something along the lines of big and impressive, and can generally handle thousands or millions of whatever it can do, and generally you’d expect a “carrier grade” product to be somehow better than a product which is “non-carrier grade”.  However, this is probably the one “carrier grade” product that generally makes things worse.  A bit of explanation here – “carrier grade” in this context means that it is suitable for a “carrier”, or telco, to use.  CGNAT is “carrier grade” in the sense that it can handle thousands and thousands of connections at once, and runs on slightly beefier hardware than your average home ADSL router, but the net effect of running CGNAT actually makes the experience worse than it would otherwise have been, since you are now removing the ability for that ISP’s users to do port forwarding through the ISP’s NAT which will almost certainly stop quite a lot of things working, for example anything that requires an incoming port (e.g. a server), or perhaps things like UPnP and even Skype.  This is probably going to cause quite a lot of compaints, depending on how much it breaks, and also means that users will be getting a consderably degraded Internet experience than they already are (since NAT is not exactly how IPv6 was intended to be used in the first place).

Plusnet had an IPv6 trial, which they stopped for some unexplained reason, and so far no word on when or if it will be resurrected.  Rolling out CGNAT and not also rolling out IPv6 seems very short-sighted to me, but more importantly the fact that they are even considering CGNAT at all suggests to me that there is one AS in the UK that could be running dangerously low on its allocated IPv4 addresses (with no prospect of obtaining any more from RIPE).

I shall be watching this space with interest…

 

6::UK Closes Down

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You’ve probably never heard of 6::UK – and that’s pretty much the problem.  They were an organisation that started in 2010 and funded by the Government to the tune of £20,000 to help and assist UK organisations and companies to make the switch to IPv6.  Today, the entire board of 6::UK resigned because they say the Government is basically not backing them.

The hopeless state of IPv6 in the UK is not really something any of us should be proud of, and none of the Big 6 consumer ISPs have rolled it out yet.  There are a few smaller ISPs that have, but in the main the ISPs that control 90-something% of the consumer market just haven’t rolled it out.  My view is that no-one basically wants to make the first move on this, because whoever does, costs themselves money, and it’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Perhaps a nice bit of public embarrassment will get things moving, but based on previous experience, I predict not.  And as the article points out, the British Government should be doing something towards this, especially as other governments around the world are.  Before it’s too late and it costs everyone three times as much to roll it out in a panic rather than do it now.

Update: The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills did bother to comment on this eventually, the text of which you can read on the BBC News article.  I’m not sure if it adds anything, though.

The Wednesday IPv4 Report

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Today’s news is that yesterday ARIN went below 3 /8s left.  As their announcement shows, this means the RIR has now moved from Phase 1 to Phase 2, which has slightly different rules on allocation.    Block requests for /16 or larger are now going to be processed in strict order, and LIRs will have 60 days to pay up and not 90 (for IPv4 blocks only).  Also unused blocks are going to be put back into the pool earlier, after three months and not six.

Interesting news, and the squeeze is on.  Let’s see how it pans out…

The Tuesday IPv4 Report

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You can always trust The Register to go for a sensationalist headline, so here goes…  The article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/dwp_ipv4_addresses_unused/ gives us the headline that the UK Department of Work and Pensions are supposedly sitting on a gold mine after someone apparently discovered that DWP has a /8 block of IPv4 which it is not advertising to the Internet (This story is orignally based on this blog post) .  Outrage followed, and the comments sections of several web sites were bunged up with demands for .gov.uk to return the block immediately to RIPE sell it for £millions and renumber it to 10.0.0.0/8 addresses.

There’s a few problems with this.  First, this is the British Government we’re talking about.  Even if they could sell the block, it would probably cost them more to renumber it than the profit they’d supposedly make from doing so.  Secondly, they’re entitled to have this block of addresses (which predate the ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/AfriNIC/LACNIC system – they were allocated by IANA as an “early registration”) and they are also entited not to advertise them, if they so choose.  There’s nothing that I know of in the rules that states they must advertise them. Thirdly, I don’t even think they can sell the block under RIPE NCC rules anyway, and even if they did return the block, it wouldn’t actually help because I believe RIPE have stated that any returned blocks would be allocated under the “final /8” rules anyway.  Fourthly, as someone amusingly pointed out in this mailing list posting, no-one’s complained at all about 25.0.0.0/8 which is another .gov.uk block, allocated to the Ministry of Defence.  And of course, finally, finding another /8 down the back of the sofa as it were would only delay IPv4 exhaustion by another month or so anyway.

And then just when you thought it had all blown over, we then see a tweet from the Cambridge MP Julian Huppert informing us that he’s tabled a question (which, who knows, might get asked at the next Prime Minister’s Question Time) about what is going on with 51.0.0.0/8.  Probably the first time IPv4 has ever been mentioned in Parliament.  And in the same tweet, he helpfully provides a link to an ePetition calling for the Government to sell the block! I won’t be signing that!

Whatever next?  I need a lie down …

This week in the IPv4 world

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And what a week it’s been!  As I posted yesterday, RIPE ran out of IPv4 addresses above the final /8 (for which special rules apply), effectively exhausting the supply in Europe.  I was predicting Tuesday of next week, personally, so all said and done, a nice way to end the week.

RIPE tweeted a link to the photo of the moment that the button was pressed – you can find the tweet here and the actual photo here

Even the Huston-o-Meter has been updated out-of-sequence yesterday, so he now accurately records the actual exhaustion date.  Still not sure why as of today his figure stands at 1.04 or so though, or even why the RIPE graph is still claiming 17.30 million addresses (1.0.3 /8s) – what’s the extra 0.03 /8s for?

So, the bit you’re all asking, who got the final blocks?  Well, a whopping 109 allocations were made yesterday.  Sifting through the data, the largest block allocated was to H3G S.p.A. of Italy which was a /14.  There was a /15 allocated to EWE TEL GmbH of Germany, and /16s allocated to Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania and Swisscom (Schweiz) AG of Switzerland.  /17s were allocated to Inspiring Networks B.V. i.o. of the Netherlands and Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania.  /18s went to YANDEX LLC of Russia, MSP Format Ltd of Ukraine, Host Europe GmbH of Germany, and Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania.

I won’t list everything else under that as it would take ages, but it seems that poor old Jump at least were given split blocks.  There were also 43 separate allocations, some as small as /29, to LIRs in Cyprus.

And so that’s it, that’s the end!  All I wish now is that all the ISPs in the UK (and probably plenty of other countries too) that haven’t moved to offering IPv6 to end users already (and that’s most of them) would actually take their head out the sand and do something about it!  (Believe it or not, even Virgin Media has a /24 of IPv6 allocated which they’re not currently allocating any of to their retail customers yet…)

And don’t forget the obligatory singing of the now-famous song of course.  Now, where’s my deckchair and popcorn … ?

The Daily IPv4 Report

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A relatively disappointing day yesterday compared to the previous two – in terms of large blocks, just a /16 allocated to Kyivstar of Ukraine.  On the plus side, the Huston-o-Meter‘s predictions are indicating just one week left!  Roll on next week!

Update: I rather liked the tweet from RIPE NCC yesterday – https://twitter.com/RIPE_NCC/status/246204688104579072 – with only somewhere between a /11 and a /12 available at the time of writing, if even RIPE are wondering if people are taking bets we must be pretty close to the end now!

The Daily IPv4 Report

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So, there were a couple of large blocks allocated by RIPE yesterday – Etisalat (Saudi Arabia) had a /14, and an ISP in Germany had a /15.  That’s another day of allocating 0.03 /8s in a day – we have days to go now if this continues, not weeks.  The Huston-o-Meter is predicting 21 September as of today, but I’m not sure it’ll be that long if the allocation rate continues at the same pace.