Zen changing static IP addresses

There's an article on The Register saying that Zen has notified customers that they're going to change their static IP addresses. There's a page on Zen's own website that starts "If we have contacted you to inform you that we are assigning new IP addresses to your service..."

It's unclear whether this affects all customers or just some. I've not received a notification and I hope this means I'm not affected, but it could mean that they just haven't got round to notifying me yet.

It's going to be disruptive for many people and, in particular, for customers who have their current IP address programmed into firewalls, etc.

Does anyone have any more information?

Have you seen this youtube video from Richard @ zen?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSK_RnJVOMM

I am with Zen and in their 82.68.0.0/14 subnet and have a /29. I have received no email.

Having has ISP change IP for work twice, we got our own /22 back in 2017 and never looked back.

So is this just a change of public addresses for some admin reason, or..... has someone woken up and got a taste of CG-NAT?!

No mail here, and no real details online so this should be interesting to see.

Almost certainly consolidating customers out of one of their IP blocks into another block, so they can sell the cleaned-out block.

I thought it might be a good idea to ask Zen whether my static IPv4 address is going to be changed. This is what we used to do in the good old days - ask a question and expect the courtesy of a reply.

Guess what happened? Message sent to Zen Tech Support last Thursday. It should have been simple to answer and taken perhaps a couple of minutes of their time. I had a prompt auto-response, saying that they aim to answer questions within 24 hours. Four days later and no response at all.

So I had another bright idea. Let's use Zen's online chat. Guess what? Their robot was polite but couldn't help so said I'd be transferred to a real person. I left the chat window open for a further two hours. No further response at all.

This is the first time I've ever tried to invoke Zen's tech support and I'm not at all impressed. They used to have a good reputation.

Zen has now replied by email to my chat attempt and to my original email query of last week, so I'm happy to report that Zen do in fact respond.

They say that "Our IP reclaim operation is focused on services with multiple IPv4 addresses" and it seems reasonable to suppose that most customers won't be affected.

Edited by ashdown (Tue 06-Feb-24 18:57:54)

From reading ispreview, there is a posting that says the people with ip addresses in the following ranges will be changed, 82.70.0.0/16 & 88.96.0.0/16

Whats happening here and TT doing the same thing really does show how over generous IP allocations were. This is likely several years of growth after Zen acquired these IP's and they still have at least 2 blocks of /16 to sell. (looks like they renting out another as well). Allocated 100s of thousands more IPs than they need with seemingly no means to yank the IPs back to central allocation authority.

In reply to a post by ashdown:

There's an article on The Register saying that Zen has notified customers that they're going to change their static IP addresses. There's a page on Zen's own website that starts "If we have contacted you to inform you that we are assigning new IP addresses to your service..."

It's unclear whether this affects all customers or just some. I've not received a notification and I hope this means I'm not affected, but it could mean that they just haven't got round to notifying me yet.

It's going to be disruptive for many people and, in particular, for customers who have their current IP address programmed into firewalls, etc.

Does anyone have any more information?

the register article was updated ,

A spokesperson for Zen told The Register: "We are making a change to the static IPv4 addresses allocated to less than 2 percent of our broadband customers. These are specifically customers with IP addresses within the ranges 82.70.0.0/16 & 88.96.0.0/16. All impacted customers will be notified on or before 29th February 2024."

So those affected should have been told a long time ago

In reply to a post by tommy45:

A spokesperson for Zen told The Register: "We are making a change to the static IPv4 addresses allocated to less than 2 percent of our broadband customers. These are specifically customers with IP addresses within the ranges 82.70.0.0/16 & 88.96.0.0/16. All impacted customers will be notified on or before 29th February 2024."

So those affected should have been told a long time ago

But also considerably after the date of the comment you replies to

As it happens I was on the 82.70/16 network. I replied to Zen about how I use my IPs and they were very nice to not charge me to keep the same size net block (on the new network of course).

In terms of how many IPs were dished out back when Zen got their allocations. I remember when I was managing the ISDN on demand connection we had with Demon at work at the time.

A standard not that expensive business account with ISDN. They asked how many IPs we'd need. Now, this was before NAT was commonly in place. So I did a quick tally of machines and doubled it for expansioon. Total was 100 or so. They just said, oh you don't need to justidy a /24. And just handed us one.

So, yeah, it wasn't hard at all to get IP addresses back then.

In reply to a post by agent_r00t:

A standard not that expensive business account with ISDN. They asked how many IPs we'd need. Now, this was before NAT was commonly in place. So I did a quick tally of machines and doubled it for expansioon. Total was 100 or so. They just said, oh you don't need to justidy a /24. And just handed us one.

So, yeah, it wasn't hard at all to get IP addresses back then.

But I bet they where allocated 'PA' - what you really wanted back in the day was 'PI' space you could take where you liked!