Possibly changing home ISPs
Reading time: 5 minutes (897 words)Author: @pugmiester
Tags: network , ipv6
Mrs P just pointed out that the price of our current internet connection for home is now costing us over £70 per month. Blimey!! When we bought the new house, we already knew that the only connectivity we had was Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) and not a copper line in sight, which also meant we had the choice of exactly one ISP that was able to offer us service so that’s who we signed up with. I can’t remember what we were paying at the time but I remember it was pretty reasonable for 135Mbps down, 30Mbps on a 24 month contract.
Then the contract expired and we just stuck with the same supplier and hadn’t realised it had got as expensive as it had until Mrs P was updating our finances spreadsheet.
So, we checked with our current supplier and they have some “exclusive offers” we can use that are either £10 per month cheaper for the same speed service or £1 more expensive for a upgrade to 150Mbps… As you can probably guess, either of these choices was considerably more expensive than the same packages from the same ISP for a new customer and also more expensive than just about any other comparable option we looked at from other suppliers too.
I think it’s time to switch. But who to? That’s the big question.
There’s an ISP I used to use, back in the days of dial-up. It’s one I looked at a couple of years ago but the numbers just didn’t stack up for their full fibre products at the time. However, with the current prices we’re paying now, things look a lot more favourable. They’re a local company with all UK based support. They even list IPv6 on their website. OK, now you have my interested.
We already get an IPv6 allocation from our current provider and as we run our own router at home it just works as you’d expect. We have a /56 prefix allocated giving me 256 x /64 prefixes to play with, each with 18 quintillion addresses available. As anyone familiar with IPv6 will tell you, the number of addresses available is pretty much irrelevant, it’s all about the subnets. We use a number of the available IPv6 prefixes for the different networks/SSID’s we operate for our trusted stuff, the guest users, IoT, etc.
I started checking the potential ISP’s website for further details on their IPv6 allocations. It says customers are allocated 2 prefixes, one for the router and one for the LAN. OK, but, the million dollar question is, “how big is the prefix allocation for the LAN?”. So, I emailed their support team to ask. I got a reply within half an hour. That’s a pretty darned quick reply in my book, especially when we’re not even a customer (yet).
Yes, they do indeed issue IPv6 address prefixes as standard. They allocate a /64 for the WAN side of the router for connectivity back to their infrastructure as well as a /48 prefix for the LAN. Cool. Wait!!! What? A /48 prefix for the LAN. But that’s, enormous.
That gives every customer the capacity to create 65,535 networks, at home, each with its own 18 quintillion addresses to choose from. I mean, I’ve seen various IPv6 deployment guides recommend allocating a /48 for every “site” which I understand for a reasonable size business customer. Even the /56 allocation we have now is massive overkill for 99% of home users and a /48 is 256 times the size of that. I guess if you have the IP space available, just allocating every customer, whether home or business, the same /48 makes IP space management simpler. You just pick the next /48 off the list.
The icing on the cake for me was that the support tech also mentioned that their support for IPv6 is baked into the router they supply but if we wanted to use our own router (like we do now anyway) we would have to set it up ourselves. The very fact they even mention using your own router is another plus from me. Of course they do supply a router with the service, and it’s a much more capable off the shelf item rather than the generic plastic box, but we have our own router/firewall anyway that’s more than up to the job.
I think we might have a winner. I need to talk it over with the boss before I commit us to anything, but I suspect she’ll be happy. Their 300mbps service practically halves our monthly outgoings, and it’s only £5 per month more to jump to 500Mbps. I think I can sell that. :-)
I just want to mention that the service we’ve had from the current supplier has been rock solid, expensive, but rock solid. We’ve heard from others on our estate complaining about the same ISP having connectivity issues, as well as just about every other ISP they may have switched to over the years. We’re using the same ISP with zero issues. I suspect the biggest reason is the £400 worth of other network switches, multiple access points and of course the router that we run that’s just better than the black plastic box, but there’s no way I’m getting into that discussion and landing myself with a whole heap of work fixing everyone else connectivity.