[ale] AT&T fiber and IPv6?

[James Sumners]

Your reply had me re-investigate. First, I discovered that I had at some 
point "broke" IPv6 assignment from upstream to my internal devices. It 
turns out that the only prefix delegation (PD) hint that AT&T supports 
is /64 (see [1]). That's disappointing, and will cause me some headache 
figuring out how to get this playing nicely on my VLANs (if I even care 
about those anymore).

Second, I learned that you should stay far, _FAR_, away from Earthlink. 
I signed up through Earthlink because I assumed I'd be able to get 
better technical support out of them, and let them run interference with 
AT&T if I ever need it. But holy hell are they bad now! Calling their 
tech support to figure out what PD hints they support was a complete 
waste of time. Their frontline support is clearly an India call center 
and kept thinking I was asking for something to do with "IPBB". Their 
online chat support, and _anyone_ I ever got on a phone call, kept 
thinking I was asking for a static IP. Performing the public Twitter 
shaming[2] got me a little further, and in touch with someone who had at 
least hear the term "IPv6" before. But they insisted that 1. they don't 
offer IPv6 to residential, 2. didn't know what to say when I told them I 
have an assigned /128 on my gateway and can use it to talk with remote 
service, and 3. insisted they wouldn't know where to get the information 
on what PD hints they support.

To drive home just how upset I am with Earthlink: I am strongly 
considering eating the contract termination cost to switch to someone 
else. At the moment, that looks like either AtlanticNexus (but their 
site nowadays gives me strong "stay away" vibes) or Toast.net. I'll 
definitely be calling first to get a feel for what they know and what 
kind of support to expect.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand:

Finding a remote service to test the IPv6 bandwidth seems to be a bit 
tricky. The best one I have found is "ionius.net". Their test seems to 
be very limited on the other end in terms of the maximum throughput, but 
they run the same test on both IPv6 and IPv6. My results are consistent 
on each stack -- https://inonius.net/results/?userId=18443091afa0. 
Others are showing maybe less down than up, but I don't know that I 
trust them.

[1] -- 
https://forums.att.com/conversations/att-fiber-account/ipv6-prefix-delegation/5e6309f2c17a0663de2c0532
[2] -- https://twitter.com/jsumners79/status/1588258761189494784

On 2022-11-03 13:02, Derek Atkins wrote:
> My experience (NB: I have not tested recently, so probably a year+ out 
> of
> date) is that their IPv6 "throughput" is much worse than their IPv4.  
> As a
> result, when I turned on IPv6 through them, I saw much less throughput
> than using v4 -- so I turned it off.
> 
> I also had an issue that using IPv6 caused FaceTime to stop working -- 
> but
> I *suspect* that was a firewall issue.  I did not spend enough time to 
> try
> to track that one down.
> 
> Obviously YMMV, but you might want to try some tests (if you care).
> 
> -derek
> 
> On Thu, November 3, 2022 12:58 pm, James Sumners via Ale wrote:
>> A follow up on this thread. AT&T finally activated the lines in mid
>> September. I signed up (through Earthlink) and have been on 1Gb
>> symmetric since September 30. I haven't noticed any issues with the 
>> IPv6
>> implementation. I do wish they would give me an SFP+ card to stick 
>> into
>> my Ubiquiti UDM-PRO instead of the huge gateway device they mandate, 
>> but
>> everything has been quite good for the first month.
>> 
>> On 2022-02-11 17:06, James Sumners (ALE) via Ale wrote:
>>> Earlier today AT&T attached some fiber to the pole directly across 
>>> the
>>> street from my driveway. I’m sure it will take them another month or
>>> two to activate the line, but I want to go ahead and solicit some
>>> knowledge from you folks.
>>> 
>>> Currently, I’m on Comcast (plain residential). I despise the
>>> business, but their network people are top notch and have rolled out 
>>> a
>>> nice stable IPv6 network. They assign my WAN interface a `/128` and
>>> allow network assignments via a `/64` or `/60` prefix delegation over
>>> DHCPv6. The `/60` allows me to create multiple VLANs in my house for
>>> things like IoT devices separate from my primary devices.
>>> 
>>> Does anyone have experience with AT&T’s IPv6 implementation? Would
>>> switching to them be mostly transparent in this regard? Are there any
>>> “gotchas” that I should be aware of?
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