Vodafone Business Broadband IPv6

I've just recently purchased Vodafone Business Broadband (Superfast 2) as a second/backup line. Can anyone tell me what the current situation is with IPv6 is on their network? I'm getting mixed stories based on their forums and various sources.

I'm planning to use a DrayTek Vigor 130 as the modem in bridge mode and pass this to my existing router for multihoming. Has Vodafone officially rolled out IPv6 on their broadband network?

Edited by jamesmacwhite (Fri 04-Sep-20 10:06:42)

Answer for anyone else curious.

No IPv6 is present currently, at least on the business lines anyway. The PPPoE connection I have doesn't provide anything IPv6 currently. I tried having a DHCPv6 client pointed at the pppoe-wan interface as an alias interface and nothing.

Hopefully they roll it out soon!

I've not seen an evidence of IPv6 on Vodafone's network.

Also a Vigor 130 user

Apparently, at some point last year and earlier this year there were some customers reporting getting an IPv6 prefix from the WAN side.

https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Broadband-connection...

However it seemed to be unstable, constantly disappearing and generally not really usable. I assume Vodafone has disabled IPv6 on the live network for now. The PPPoE tunnel has zero IPv6 from what I can see for now at least.

I do wonder what Vodafone will do for business users, I assume a static prefix delegation of sorts.

If you main router supports 6in4 tunnels (rfc4213) you could use a Hurricane Electric IPv6 in IPv4 tunnel as a temporary measure.

You can get a static /48 which in one way can be better than an ISP prefix delegation as it does not change.

Performance, of course, is poorer.

I do have IPv6 connectivity through another provider, AAISP and their L2TP tunnel service which is native IPv6, so slightly better than 6in4 although still a tunnel, the downside it's an additional cost but a better solution longer term. I used 6in4 for a while but it's generally an issue on Virgin Media connections which I also have, so I ended up moving away from it. Technically because I have multiple static IPv4's with various providers I could have the tunnel linked to a non Virgin Media IP and that problem goes away, but it's an extra dependency, that if the WAN it's going through drops or the tunnels goes down, so does IPv6 with it.

The main reason for IPv6 across all WANs I have is multihoming so you have failover for each WAN without such dependencies. Obviously at the moment, I only have IPv6 from a single provider in this case. Although the AAISP tunnel isn't bound to a specific WAN technically, so it could easily failover to Vodafone, just at a reduced speed due to Virgin Media being 100 Mbps, while Vodafone max is around 70 - 80 Mbps.

6in4 has been useful though over the years. It allowed me to learn a lot about IPv6 generally, even though providers have been slow with it.

Edited by jamesmacwhite (Sat 19-Sep-20 13:34:24)