[ale] AT&T fiber and IPv6?

Fri Nov 4 11:51:34 EDT 2022

FWIW, I am a satisfied Atlantic-Nexus customer, but I am not playing 
with IPV6, so YMMV.

Stephen R. Blevins
stephen.r.blevins at gmail.com

On 11/4/22 10:38, James Sumners via Ale wrote:
> 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?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ale mailing list
>>> Ale at ale.org
>>> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>>>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo