BT to Deploy IPv6 to Entire Network by December 2016

philip2009 · 23 Sep 2015 at 16:21

BT to Deploy IPv6 to Entire Network by December 2016

"...the operator informed the 2nd UK IPv6 Council Meeting in London today of their plans, which will see the “new” Internet addressing standard deployed to 50% of their national network in the United Kingdom by April 2016 and then 100% by December 2016. The deployment will officially get underway this year with a very “gentle start“.

Customers with one of BT’s latest HomeHub 5 broadband routers will be the first to get the service and the ISP is also looking at an upgrade for their existing HomeHub 4, but those with older hardware may be out of luck. ..."

Full article ...

And if BT do it I expect everybody else will follow pretty quickly ...

Orcvader · 23 Sep 2015 at 21:18

About time too. Hopefully my RT-AC68U won't run into any issues with IPv6.

Bobmunkhouse · 23 Sep 2015 at 21:32

Will normal users notice a difference or is it just so there are more address's to give out?

holdin09 · 23 Sep 2015 at 21:45

Bobmunkhouse said:
Will normal users notice a difference or is it just so there are more address's to give out?

Probably won't see a different but the packets are smaller for now but will get filled up as there is room. So in other words might be the a tiny increase for now but will go back to normal.

Caged · 23 Sep 2015 at 22:38

This is great news, hopefully it's what was needed to break the chicken-and-egg cycle.

holdin09 said:
Probably won't see a different but the packets are smaller for now but will get filled up as there is room. So in other words might be the a tiny increase for now but will go back to normal.

matthab · 24 Sep 2015 at 06:53

About time!!!

BattFink · 24 Sep 2015 at 11:23

They should have done this years ago! (although I can see why they'd take a while)

Either way good news

Muffin` · 24 Sep 2015 at 12:12

Caged said:

haha - not just me then, I read that line three times

thenewoc · 24 Sep 2015 at 12:24

So I wonder if this will mean everyone will end up with an individual static IP from their ISP.

kayomani · 24 Sep 2015 at 12:27

Unlikely, there is more of a possibility the isp will sell you multiple ip addresses on the cheap mind you due to the number of ipv6 addresses there are.

Caged · 24 Sep 2015 at 23:53

One of the major benefits of IPv6 is that you won't need to perform NAT any more since IP addresses aren't a scarce resource. Current practise seems to be for each subscriber to get a /48. This may not translate to what's going to happen in the consumer space even though there is no danger of running out of addresses, but there is no way each subscriber will only get a single IPv6 address.

Even if each subscriber 'only' got a /120 that's still over 250 hosts on each network, which is more than enough for the home. Hopefully we will see decent ASIC development to enable real firewalling in sub-£100 devices which can help out with the cost/performance ratio of higher end gear.

Rofflay · 25 Sep 2015 at 01:39

I have a Home Hub 3 :s

Waiting on the G.INP Home Hub 6 with IPV6 too. I reckon thats what i will renew for hehe and hopefully by then 100mb is out with IPV6. I will sign up even though BT did a really dirty £1b trick on the Goverment i can see now they have a great platform and deal for me.

All of the above and BT TV 4K box in one line saving a lot of cables very very nice indeed. It actually is starting to look like a semi decent platform when you think about Japan/Korea.

branddaly · 25 Sep 2015 at 12:41

Orcvader said:
About time too. Hopefully my RT-AC68U won't run into any issues with IPv6.

RT-AC68U works fine on IPv6, been running mine for over a year with it. Only thing I dislike is that the IPv6 firewall is not enabled by default. That's going to catch some people out.

Trifid · 25 Sep 2015 at 13:33

holdin09 said:
Probably won't see a different but the packets are smaller for now but will get filled up as there is room. So in other words might be the a tiny increase for now but will go back to normal.

IPv6 headers are longer. Any unused fields are always filled as the receiving equipment expects each field to start and end at a certain point.

andshrew · 25 Sep 2015 at 13:54

Does uPnP or something similar still exist in the IPv6 world?

Presumably your router would have a firewall which all traffic passes through, likely with a default deny-all rule for traffic coming from the Internet. Are we back to manual management of the firewall or does uPnP still exist to allow your devices to 'open' the firewall as required?

Caged · 25 Sep 2015 at 15:33

Stateful firewalls have existed forever and do exactly that - they allow incoming traffic for already-established outbound connections.